[linux-help] Re: floppy problem

[Jeff Vian <jvian10@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

As long as the mcopy command has the device (/dev/floppy) busy you will 
not be able to use the cp command to copy anything to it. Nor will you 
be able to mount or umount it.

     ps -auxw    --or--   ps -auxww
can be used  to display more than the 80 chars that default to display. 
 Also, if you are using a terminal window under X (I am using gnome); 
 simply stretching the width of the window prior to issuing the ps 
command will display the output line to the current width of the window.

looking at the man page for the ps command will give you all the options 
available.

I often use the "kill -9 PID" option to kill processes that will not die 
by other means. However, some processes will not respond to that and may 
need the parent process killed (the terminal window or the Xwindow 
server) in order to force the system to kill it.

I have not tried to kill anything with a status of D, but a status of 
(defunct) or a (Z) cannot be killed without killing the parent process.

Your question on grep --
grep can only look at the displayed line.  If the phrase being grepped 
for (floppy) is not in the displayed output of the ps command grep 
cannot find it to select and display.  Using the ps -auxw or multiple 
"w"s  will display more of the line and then grep will work as expected.


bruce wrote:

>This isn't an earthshaking problem, but is mysterious to me.
>
>I tried to copy a small file (~95k) to a blank floppy using mcopy.  Got 
>a segmentation fault.  Tried again and the terminal gave me a blank 
>line.  Cntl-C had no effect.  Couldn't get my terminal back.
>
>Opened another terminal and tried "cp file-name  /mnt/floppy/" then 
>"umount /mnt/floppy"    Got back "device busy"
>
>Looked in ps -aux and the mcopy command is there with pid 12310 and 
>status D.  It can't be killed with kill 12310.  
>
>Status D means uninterruptible sleep according to the man page.
>
>The line that shows up with "ps -aux" is this:
>bruce    12310  0.0  0.0  1612  552 ?        D    10:38   0:00 mcopy 
>gcc /mnt/floppy/
>
>Short of restarting kde, is there any way to kill an uninterruptible 
>sleeping process?  Or perhaps restarting kde won't kill it?
>
>A sidenote:
>
>When I try "ps -aux  |grep floppy"  the line doesn't show up, but most 
>of the line does show up with "ps -aux  |grep 12310".  (I think maybe 
>grep only looks at the first 80 characters???)
>
>bruce
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