[Techtalk] sighup, kill -9, sigkill, and all those related things

Kathryn Hogg kjh at flyballdogs.com
Fri Apr 14 23:39:30 EST 2006


Yesterday someone suggested using "kill 9 $pid" as a better way of getting
rid of zombies instead of "kill -9 pid".  I don't see how that could have
the desired effect.

The way that "kill 9 $pid" behaves is that it interprets 9 and $pids as
processes to send the desired signal to.  Since no signal is specified,
the default signal of SIGTERM is used:  kill -TERM 9 $pid.

On my box, process 9 (ps -f -p 9) is kacpid.  So when I run "kill 9 $pid",
i get a nice friendly message stating that i don't have proper credentals
to send it a signal.

-- 
Kathryn
http://womensfooty.com



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