[TriLUG] mhonarc

[Owen Berry]

By default kill sends a TERM signal to the process. The process can
choose what to do with that signal - it can ignore it, as it is probably
doing in this case, or handle it and die cleanly. If it didn't register
a signal handling function for the particular signal, the OS will kill
it. A KILL signal (also -9) causes the OS to kill the process without
giving it a chance.

Make sense?

Additional reading:

man kill
man signal
view /usr/include/bits/signum.h (most Linux systems)

Owen

On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 16:03 -0400, Randy Barlow wrote:
> You could try kill -s KILL 4465 (sometimes the plain old kill command 
> doesn't really kill things...)  Anybody have any elaborations on why 
> this works by the way?  I've been using it for a while just because it 
> works, but don't really understand the differences between kill and kill 
> -s KILL.  Thanks!
>