Nice information so I shamelesslly copy it over to my blog for later reference
Restarting GNOME Shell using Terminal, or How to use SIGHUP
Recently I’ve been using my laptop for some heavy processing and as a result of that GNOME Shell started to freeze every now and then.
Normally when something goes wrong I try “alt+f2” and then “r” which is a shortcut to restart the GNOME Shell, but when it freezes you can only use your mouse … and go to other terminals!I’m talking about TTYs, one of the most wonderful features of Unix based operating systems, IMO. It is simply fascinating that you can use one set of mouse/keyboard/monitor to login with more than one user at the same time.
Back to the GNOME Shell problem. The solution is simple: send a signal to whatever process that is causing the problem. If it’s flash player or a game just kill it with SIGKILL or pause it with SIGSTOP, but as far as I know, many Linux services recognize the SIGHUP (signal code=1), including GNOME Shell. You can use `kill` or `killall` command to send this signal to programs like this:# kill -s SIGHUP [pid]
# killall -s SIGHUP [process name]Here is the description of the signal according to the manual page of signal in section 7:
Signal Value Action Comment
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
SIGHUP 1 Term Hangup detected on controlling terminal
or death of controlling processBasically this signal is just poking the process and giving the information with no predefined action (whereas SIGKILL kills the program no matter what), so it’s up to the programmer to define a procedure to be executed in case of receiving that signal.
Fortunately for me, GNOME developers have been kind enough to implement such a procedure that just reboots GNOME Shell without closing child processes (which include all graphical programs!), just as “alt+f2″ “r” does.
That’s it, just don’t kill Linux services, poke them with SIGHUP!
This entry was written by mahrud, posted on December 22, 2012 at 6:09 AM, filed under Linux and tagged freeze, gnome-shell, reboot, SIGHUP, tty. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
http://algorithms.ir/~mahrud/blog/2012/12/restarting-gnome-shell-terminal-or-sighup/