Processes Out of Control? Just STOP Them

Especially if you're a programmer, you can run into a situation where you have processes forking (Section 24.2) out of control — more and more of them. By the time you kill one, fifty more fork.

On systems with job control ( Section 23.3), there's a good answer: use the STOP signal to stop the processes:
kill Section 24.12
```
kill -STOP ...
```
Stop any process you can so that it can't fork more processes. Stop them all. Then start cleaning up with kill -9.
If your system manager has set a per-user process limit on your computer, the good news is that your processes won't eventually crash the system. But the bad news is, when you try to run any command that isn't built into the shell (Section 1.9) (like killall (Section 24.16), which would be nice to use in this situation, if you have it):
```
% killall -STOP myprog
No more processes.
```
you can't because you're already at your limit.
If that happens, log on to another account or ask someone to run a command that will give a list of your processes. Depending on your system, the command is probably like one of these two:
```
% ps -u yourname 
                     
                     System V
% ps aux | grep yourname 
                     
                     BSD
```
Then go back to your terminal and start stopping :-). If you get the No more processes error, your shell must not have a built-in kill command. Many shells do — including bash and csh. Carefully type the next commands to be sure that /bin/bash exists (assuming your shell has a built-in echo, this trick^[7] bypasses the external ls command); then, if the shell is there, replace your shell with bash. Don't make a mistake (if you do, you may not be able to log in again):
exec Section 36.5
```
$ echo /bin/bas?
/bin/bash
$ exec /bin/bash
bash$ kill ...
```

— JP

^[7] This trick uses the shell's built-in wildcard matching (Section 1.13) to show you the shell's name — we hope. If you get an answer like /bin/bas?, or multiple answers that don't include /bin/bash, try another shell name. (Maybe your bash is in /usr/local/bin, for instance.) If you get an answer like No more processes, though, your echo command probably isn't built in.