chill wrote: > > More good advice, thank you. But why is it a bad habit? > >
When a process receives a signal, it usually has a chance to do something -- in fact, some signals are -only- used for "doing something", and don't kill a process by default. They might be used to tell the process to re-read its config file, for instance. But even if it's being told to die (which is what SIGTERM, the default signal from kill) is usually used for, it still might want to flush some output buffers, or if it has created its own pidfile, it might want to remove it. At the very least, the process might want to log that it's dying because of a signal. So it would do any of those things before calling exit. Now, a misbehaved (or buggy) process might catch your SIGTERM signal and then not exit. That's what SIGKILL (i.e., kill -9) is for. SIGKILL can't be caught and handled by a process -- it just kills it immediately. If you use it by habit, you may be preventing the process you're killing from doing an orderly shutdown. Kind of like pulling the plug on your PC instead of typing shutdown. It'll usually be fine when you start it back up, but then that one time.... ;-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pgf's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=58510 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=113661 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list unix@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/unix
