This message is for Octavian and anyone else who has not yet learned that you don't need to reboot Linux to solve a problem. Here's what to do instead: 1.) Become root in another console and kill the application that is giving you trouble. In Octavian's example the application is emacs, so here's the appropriate command for root to give in another console: killall emacs 2.) If all else fails, kill the console session as root from another console. get a listing of everything running in the console where you got stuck. If that console is tty1, for example, you would do: ps -t tty1 This will print out a list of all the running processes in tty1. Find the one that says "bash" on the right hand side of the line, and note the process id, called pid, on the left. Then kill that pid as follows: kill -9 pid where pid is the process id you identified for bash above. There are more elegant ways to get out of trouble, but these two will keep you learning and keep you from wasting time rebooting. To learn more about these things look at the man pages for killall, kill, pidof, and ps. -- Janina Sajka, Director Technology Research and Development Governmental Relations Group American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Email: janina at afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175 Chair, Accessibility SIG Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF) http://www.openebook.org Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
