Ok here was the issue, When I was working a few hours ago, Xserver crashed but the linux was keep running, so I was able to SSH to my machine from a different machine and H was running, and I really wanted to save the scene. So I tried to figure out how to send a command to Houdini to save but failed to do so, any ideas?

You can force Houdini to crash by
kill -11 PID
it will save your file in temp directory.

You can get PID by typing:
top | grep Houdini

PradeepBarua
You can force Houdini to crash by
kill -11 PID
it will save your file in temp directory.

You can get PID by typing:
top | grep Houdini

thnx a lot, while we are at it, lemme ask another one, most of the time there is more than one houdini open, and if one becomes unresponsive, I might have to kill it, but i cannot see the file names, in htop , is there a way to figure out which Houdini to kill based on scene name

most of the time there is more than one houdini open, and if one becomes unresponsive, I might have to kill it, but i cannot see the file names, in htop , is there a way to figure out which Houdini to kill based on scene name

PID tells you which job created first. Let's say you have 3 instances of Houdini open on your machine, now which Houdini you launch first, would have lower PID number.
You have to keep remember order of opening Houdini session or scene file.

PradeepBarua

most of the time there is more than one houdini open, and if one becomes unresponsive, I might have to kill it, but i cannot see the file names, in htop , is there a way to figure out which Houdini to kill based on scene name

PID tells you which job created first. Let's say you have 3 instances of Houdini open on your machine, now which Houdini you launch first, would have lower PID number.
You have to keep remember order of opening Houdini session or scene file.

thnx man you have been greatly helpful

You can also have a look at backup folder inside your hip folder. There you can find backup of your .hip file with _bakX suffix. See there whether backup file generated or not. By default it get generated after every minute but sometimes it may not.

you can also use something like “ps -aux | grep houdini” which will give you the command line used to launch houdini, so if you had opened it with the name of the hipfile (eg. houdini -n myhipfile.hip" you would be able to tell that way.

-G