On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 12:17:34AM +1000, Simon Wong wrote: > On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 00:00, Intelligent Dynamic wrote: > > > > A man kill will help, as it explains the different kill levels that you pass > > as an argument. 9 kills a process without caring what state it is in. > > Will have a close read of it. Was a bit confused by the signals and > assumed that the default would be "kill at all costs".
By default it sends "SIGTERM", which essentially asks a process to terminate (but a process may choose to ignore it, or whatever). A SIGTERM gives a process a chance to cleanly exit. The nasty option is "SIGKILL" (which is number 9, hence "kill -9"), which simply terminates the process without asking first. The process never gets informed that it is about to die, the kernel simply kills it. -Andrew. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
