Question

I’m reading a big file using fread. When I interrupt the program during it using Ctrl+C, the program hangs and is not killable, also not with kill -9. It simple sticks with 100% CPU, keeping the RAM it had already allocated. It would be great to get that fixed, but it would also be okay just to be able to kill that application from outside (the main problem being the fact that I can’t restart that machine myself).
Is there a way of doing that in Unix?

Thanks!

Here is the source:

int Read_New_Format(const char* prefix,const char* folder)
{
  char filename[500];
  long count_pos;
  //open files for reading. 
  sprintf(filename,"%s/%s.pos.mnc++",folder,prefix);
  FILE *pos = fopen(filename,"r");
  if(pos==NULL)
  {
    printf("Could not open pos file %s\n",filename);


  }

  //read the number count of entries in each of the three files.
   fread(&count_pos,sizeof(long),1,pos);


  printf("[...]");

  //read the complete file into an array.

  float *data_pos = new float[3*count_pos];



  fread(data_pos,3*sizeof(float),*count_pos,pos);

  printf("Read files.\n");
[...]
}

Answer 1

Problem wasn’t reproducable after some days. Maybe a problem with the file system. As a workaround, direct use of the unix library routines instead of fread worked.