First of all, what kill does with a signal is somewhat dependent on the programming of the process or daemon. In general though I have found these three to be used in this manner: kill -1 (thats a one) tell the process to re-read its config file or to re-initialize the process kill -6 tells the process to finish up it current process, flush its buffers and then stop kill -9 tells the process to die, die, die immediately.
I was raised to do a kill -1 on process after I had changed its config file. INETD is a good example of that. Inetd only reads the config file on start-up, so if you modify it, instead of stopping and restarting it, you send it a "kill -1" which tells it to re-load its config into memory. The same is true for Named. I believe that "kill -6" is the default signal, so when you "kill" a process you are actually sending it signal #6 (SIGABRT - signal to abort). Normally "kill -6" works great, but sometimes the errant process stops listening for signals.. whats a sysadmin to do? that's when its time to bring on the heavy guns: "kill -9"... because we all know that rebooting is only for Windows! As I recall, there was great message detailing signal use that passed through this list about 2 years ago... It would be in the old archives on sunsite - not that google cant provide adequate fruit to quench the hunger of our questions. Jon ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Knowles" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 8:26 AM Subject: [TriLUG] kill signals > OK, I knew -KILL, and thanks to Jon Carnes I'm now familiar with -HUP, (which > worked to kill the ppp side of the pptpd gracefully. Thanks) > > I do a kill -l (That's an L) and I see all these other signals. > > How can I find out what they mean? > > CJK > _______________________________________________ > TriLUG mailing list > http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
