On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:17:52 -0500 M Harris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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 that does not work, then by all means use SIGKILL (-9) as it is not catchable by the process. -- Jerry Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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