On Tuesday 20 March 2007 12:37, Randall R Schulz wrote:
kill -9 <PID>
Absolutely a bad idea. Many programs have clean-up operations to perform. This guarantees those clean-up actions will not take place.
Signal TERM or 15 is the clean way to kill a process. Only resort to KILL or 9 when TERM does not cause the process to terminate. Yup, except that what we are talking about here is a process that won't die... kill -9 <PID> is the ONLY way to get it to happen.
Another way to say this is that if SIGTERM will kill the process then you probably didn't need to be in an xterm window running the kill command in the first place. The usual reason for a process to "refuse to die" is that it is no longer correctly performing signal handling, so giving it the SIGTERM is useless.
kill -9 <PID> is the only way to go in these situations. The difference is that SIGTERM is a catchable signal, and should generally be tried first because the process can clean itself up. If
On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:17:52 -0500
M Harris