On Sun, 30 Apr 2000, Tim McNamara wrote:

> I was running pine last night, which is a sloooow application at best 
> on my system (PB 145B, 8 MB RAM, 16 MB swap, large-ish root & user 
> partitions on an external hard drive).  After tryng to catch up on 
> newsgroups using ;aad, the system seems to have hung.  It's been 
> about 9 hours since it did anything, except when the ISP disconnected 
> me it did put up a notice about that.  ^C doesn't seem to have any 
> effect, nor any other command.
> 
> Any way to kill this thing without using the power button?

pine reads keyboard input in raw mode, and ignores interrupts from the
keyboard like ^C and ^\, preferring to process them itself rather than
take a signal.  Unfortunately, this means that when pine stops processing
keyboard input for whatever reason, the only way to quit the process is to
send it a SIGHUP or SIGKILL from another process.

If pine is monopolising your console and you're unable to get a shell
prompt from the console to kill pine, your only option is to log in
remotely (over the network, or a serial port if you have getty running) or
to force a reboot.

If your console driver supports virtual consoles, you might be able to
switch to another virtual console and kill pine from there, but I don't
know if NetBSD/m68k has virtual consoles yet.
-- 
Tod McQUillin