[techtalk] Is there a Kill -8, too?

[Kristina]

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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