Killing Mr Walker and Multiple instances of gw

[Thunderstone]

Hi!

If you run gw in the background using & , how do you safely kill the process?

My scenario (Solaris SPARC):

I started gw and then my Net connection broke, so I lost the telnet
session. But when I reconnected, the process was still running.

I tried to kill gw, didn't work so I killed it -9. Unfortunately this
resulted in a zombie.

I'm a Unix newbie, but from searching the Net I now know that I should kill
the parent process to get rid of a zombie. Being a newbie, I'd like the
comfort of knowing I'm not about to wreck something when killing the parent


On a similar note, is it safe to run two copies of gw at the same time?
Let's say I have scheduled gw to rewalk the db once a week. Can I still
tell gw to index a new site by invoking it manually?


TIA,

/J

------ ---- --- -- -- -- -  -   -    -        -
Johan Lindström                       BossMedia
Sourcerer                     johanl@bahnhof.se
                 http://www.bahnhof.se/~johanl/
If the only tool you have is a hammer,
everything tends to look
like a nail

[Thunderstone]

A normal kill will generally work. If gw is in the middle of a page
fetch or index build, it will attempt to finish that before quitting. A
second kill, or a kill -9, will force it to quit. A forced quit may
leave the database in an unstable state.

The zombie just means that gw's parent process (your shell) did not
recognize that it died. Probably a side effect of your broken telnet
session.

To make sure gw continues to run smoothly during a broken connection
use the standard unix nohup command. e.g.:

nohup gw -d- http://www.yoursite.com &

Look in "nohup.out" for gw's output. See your unix manual about nohup.


You can run multiple gw's at once as long as the tasks you've assigned
them don't conflict. If a rewalk is in progress, as opposed to waiting
for the next scheduled time, and you add a site to the same database,
that site will not be present when the rewalk finishes.