Wicked Cool Perl Scripts

#27 Killing a Stuck Process

I used to work for a large company that used one of the worst build systems I've ever seen. One of the biggest problems was that if you logged out without properly shutting down your development environment, one of the background programs would get stuck in the run state, trying continuously to connect to a front end that wasn't there.

As a result, you'd find several high-performance build machines slowed down by useless stuck processes. This meant that you had to spend time and effort tracking down the user or a system administrator to kill the rogue process.

Perl lets you do automatically what used to be done manually; in this case, identify and kill stuck programs.

The Code

 1 #!/usr/bin/perl 2 use strict; 3 use ...