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

[Nicole]

> > Did you try 'kill pid' or 'kill -9 pid'? 'kill -9' should bring down
> > anything.
> 
> Simple question (I hope):
> 
> 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 ;)

[colby at ghettoBOX colby]$ kill -l
 1) SIGHUP       2) SIGINT       3) SIGQUIT      4) SIGILL
 5) SIGTRAP      6) SIGIOT       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

common sigs... 
sighup asks the process to restart
sigint is an interrupt
sigkill stops it (there's no getting by this one)
sigterm is the default, it nicely tries to terminate the process
sigchld kills all the children threads

there ARE different kill "levels", they are called "signals"... so kill -9
is really converted to a SIGKILL signal which is shot right at the process
ID you give it 

a kill -1 will politely ask the process to restart itself from scratch by
sending it a SIGHUP signal (useful for restarting things without
rebooting)

:o)
-nicole


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