On Tue, 12 Oct 1999, Amanda Knox wrote:
> Why is it '-9' exactly? Are there different kill levels or something? What if
> I typed 'Kill -1'? Just curious, and I doubt I would have the know-how to
> find that exact answer in the man pages ;)
The -9 option is "kill with extreme prejudice, no waiting, no giving it
a chance to die gracefully, just kill it NOW!" You sometimes have to do
this to out-of-control processes.
The -1 option is usually a "hangup" signal, or in other words, "kill -1"
would just tell the process to re-read its configuration file(s) or
otherwise restart itself, rather than killing it totally.
Usually, if you just type "kill <some process>" it's really "kill -15"
which asks the process to terminate gracefully, saving data if possible.
There are about 30 "kill" options (from "kill -l" on my box):
1) SIGHUP 2) SIGINT 3) SIGQUIT 4) SIGILL
5) SIGTRAP 6) SIGABRT 7) SIGBUS 8) SIGFPE
9) SIGKILL 10) SIGUSR1 11) SIGSEGV 12) SIGUSR2
13) SIGPIPE 14) SIGALRM 15) SIGTERM 17) SIGCHLD
18) SIGCONT 19) SIGSTOP 20) SIGTSTP 21) SIGTTIN
22) SIGTTOU 23) SIGURG 24) SIGXCPU 25) SIGXFSZ
26) SIGVTALRM 27) SIGPROF 28) SIGWINCH 29) SIGIO
30) SIGPWR
But usually the most common ones are -1, -9, and -15.
Kristina
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