Re: kill -KILL: What happens?

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
 
> At least on Unix I don't believe there is any other solution.  You
> could try looking at ps output but there's a fundamental race
> condition, ie the postmaster could spawn another child just before
> you kill it, whereupon the child is reassigned to init and there's
> no longer a good way to tell that it came from that postmaster.
 
Couldn't you run `ps auxf` and kill any postgres process which is
not functioning as postmaster (those are pretty easy to distinguish)
and which isn't the child of such a process?  Is there ever a reason
to allow such an orphan to run?
 
-Kevin