Question

A trained killer ( kill -9 )

Asked by: TIMFOX123

The kill command has not tipicaly worked for me and need to usually resort to kill -9

I know that it can leave ram unusable until we reboot.  Am I doing something wrong ?

Can someone review the kill commands as If I do not know them ? "kill -1" etc.  

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Asked On
2009-11-03 at 08:12:48ID24867587
Topics

Fedora Linux

,

Linux

,

CentOS

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
2

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Answers

 

by: oheilPosted on 2009-11-03 at 08:31:55ID: 25730673

kill sends a signal to a process.
Processes are able to implement their own reaction on a signal, e.g. to ignore it or to shutdown with cleaning up something like temporary files.
The signal, which can not be self implemented by a process is the signal KILL which has the number 9.
Some other signals are:
HUP 1 Hangup
STOP
CONT continue if stopped
...
It is basically a rudimentary form of interprocess communication: the kill command communicates with another process. The other process gets a defined interrupt on which it can react as it wants or needs (except KILL and STOP).

Thats it.

Regards,

Oli

 

by: ollfriedPosted on 2009-11-03 at 10:32:56ID: 25731934

Don't worry about memory, it's not beig left unusable. The worst that can happen is that you get a Zombie-Process that remains in your process list, but this just allocates a couple of bytes.
The question is: What processes do you have to kill and why?

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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