[TriLUG] kill signals

James Manning trilug at sublogic.com
Thu Feb 14 12:06:55 EST 2002


[Jon Carnes]
>   kill -9  tells the process to die, die, die immediately.

Actually, the process doesn't get SIGKILL - it doesn't have the option
of, say, catching and ignoring it, but that's a implementation issue.

> 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).

no, 15 (TERMinate) is the default:

DESCRIPTION
       The  command kill sends the specified signal to the speci­
       fied process or process group.  If no signal is specified,
       the  TERM  signal is sent.

> 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!

if you watch a shutdown, you'll notice processes get TERM'd first so
they're given a chance to catch that and shutdown nicely before the
sigKILL's are distributed.  using ABRT in this manner's not recommended,
since programs are more likely to be waiting for TERM (although they
might be nice enough to have installed their shutdown handler for
both, but not guaranteed)

As mentioned elsewhere, specific actions are arch/process/etc dependent.
-- 
James Manning <jmm at sublogic.com>
GPG Key fingerprint = B913 2FBD 14A9 CE18 B2B7  9C8E A0BF B026 EEBB F6E4



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