How to kill a process that has hit the nproc limit.

Solution Unverified - Updated -

Issue

  • What can I do to regain control of my computer when a process goes wild creating so many forks that I can't run any command?
  • Even a ps command to get the pid of the errant process fails.
  • What can I do short of rebooting?

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • ulimit

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