SA44@LIVERPOOL.AC.UK (Kevin Maguire) (05/31/90)
I was (trying) to back up my ST minix 1.5.10 root partition with the
special ST minix backup that was posted to the net just before 1.5.0
came out i.e. not the standard one that Andy wrote (this one compresses
files and tars them out to floppy in a special format)
Well after running it I realised I had done something wrong so I tried
to stop it with the delete key i.e. send it an INT. I pressed it once but
as usual the process didn't stop straight away. Of course me being the
patient soul that I am I hit the INT key again. This is where it went
stange :-) The login: prompt appeared, so I thought I was logged out.
I proceeded to log in again but the backup programs was still outputing
which files it was backing up to the console. I logged in regardless and
found that the backup program was running even though the shell below
it had died. Is this possible, shouldn't the backup process have been sent
a SIGHUP if it's shell had died??
Later, that night [:-)] I tried the same started backup and after a
while tried to interrupt it...
- pressed INT no joy
- pressed INT again... no joy
- banged INT a few times and waited????? no joy
- CTRL-ALT-F10 to SIGKILL all processes (I don't use half measures ;-))
- still no joy even SIGKILL didn't work!!!!!!
- just kept banging the INT key... after a few seconds the ST just reset??
Could this be some sort of minix problem. Other processes die fine.
I've also experienced the difficulty in killing make, that other users
have reported. This backup problem hasn't reoccured again, but I'm sure
processes don't handle signals correctly in ST minix 1.5.10.
This is not a scare story, but just to provoke some disscussion as how
my ST MINIX could have behaved like that!
Kevin Maguire
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