Why you should not use kill -9
I recenty found this advice given by Randal Schwartz. I think most of programmers got some idea who he is. Anyway if you have not had to touch Perl here is the link to wiki page.
Here is the advice from Randal:
No no no. Don't use kill -9.
It doesn't give the process a chance to cleanly:
1) shut down socket connections
2) clean up temp files
3) inform its children that it is going away
4) reset its terminal characteristics
and so on and so on and so on.
Generally, send 15, and wait a second or two, and if that doesn't work, send 2, and if
that doesn't work, send 1. If that doesn't, REMOVE THE BINARY because the program is
badly behaved!
Don't use kill -9. Don't bring out the combine harvester just to tidy up the flower pot.
In a short:
- 15 is SIGTERM (terminate),
- 2 is SIGINT (interrupt, ctrl-c),
- 1 is SIGHUP (terminal hangup, often overloaded to keep a process running but reload the config)
For those who would like to have full overview to all availabe signals here is a snippet from signal.h
:
–robert
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