By default kill sends a TERM signal to the process. The process can choose what to do with that signal - it can ignore it, as it is probably doing in this case, or handle it and die cleanly. If it didn't register a signal handling function for the particular signal, the OS will kill it. A KILL signal (also -9) causes the OS to kill the process without giving it a chance.
Make sense? Additional reading: man kill man signal view /usr/include/bits/signum.h (most Linux systems) Owen On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 16:03 -0400, Randy Barlow wrote: > You could try kill -s KILL 4465 (sometimes the plain old kill command > doesn't really kill things...) Anybody have any elaborations on why > this works by the way? I've been using it for a while just because it > works, but don't really understand the differences between kill and kill > -s KILL. Thanks! > -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
