This happened to me before, i do not remember what i did but it was mostly killing anything associated with the process, killing the login process should send a sighup that process. i think in the end i just had to wait for it to recover. bummer. Worst case senario you can take the machine down to single user mode, and kill the process then. on the same topic, i always thought that kill -9 would end a process imediately and uncleanly if needed, it there a command that will kill no mater what, as in a "stop this stupid process, take away all resources from it, forget it ever existed and if it gives you any shit ignore it" command -munir On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Amy Tanner wrote: > I was removing some RPMs using rpm -e [package] and the process > appeared to hang. After many minutes of waiting, I attempted to kill it, > with no success. And I cannot do any other rpm commands until it's done/killed. > What can I do? > > [root at walleye atanner]# ps -ef | grep rpm > root 5863 5836 0 11:47 ? 00:00:00 rpm -e apmd autofs xisdnload isdroot 5971 5906 0 12:03 ttyp2 00:00:00 grep rpm > [root at walleye atanner]# kill -9 5863 > [root at walleye atanner]# ps -ef | grep rpm > root 5863 5836 0 11:47 ? 00:00:00 rpm -e apmd autofs xisdnload isdroot 5974 5906 0 12:08 ttyp2 00:00:00 grep rpm > [root at walleye atanner]# rpm -q apmd > error: cannot get shared lock on /var/lib/rpm/Packages > error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Operation not permitted (1) > > thanks. > > --