Re: [gdm-list] Killing the killable

[Bob Doolittle <Robert Doolittle Sun COM>]

Brian Cameron wrote:
> > Is this behaviour expected, and if so would there be any other way to tell
> > what processes on a system are associated with a given session?
> >
> > Many thanks in advance for your help and support,
> >     
>
> I think that this query might be more appropriate to ask on
> gnome-hackers gnome org or gnome-desktop-devel gnome org mail lists, since
> the offending processes are related to GNOME and not really GDM itself.
>   

Actually, I think the answer to this hinges on the
exact definition of a "desktop session", since to
kill all processes associated with "it" you have to
know what "it" is. :-) This isn't really Gnome
related, it's more of an X server concept in my
opinion.

One possibly useful working definition is "every
process with a particular $DISPLAY defined in its
environment".  You'd have to have root permission
(on Solaris at least), and walk the process table
searching the environment of every process.  This
is likely to be quite expensive.  You can use
/usr/ucb/ps for this purpose, on Solaris systems.
On Linux systems I think the default ps allows for
the "-e" option to inspect the environment but I'm
not a Linux expert so could be wrong.

-Bob