Idle and Looping Process Killers?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <1991Feb27.041048.24190 at eplrx7.uucp> mroz at eplrx7.uucp (Peter Mroz) writes:
>I'm looking for a program (exe or shell script) that will kill idle processes
>on Unix.  I also need a program that detects runaway processes.

How would you define these precisely enough that a program could recognize
them?  When I manually kill such processes, I use a number of heuristics.
For instance, a GNU emacs or Korn shell process running hard but with very
small resident set size is probably in a loop due to losing its tty.  Last
night I killed a uuxqt process that had been running for four hours, using
about 12% CPU/real time on a Sun-3/280 (it might have been doing useful
stuff, but the system was having performance problems and I doubted it was
important enough).


--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar