Re: Killing Processes

In the last exciting episode, mike(at)fuhr(dot)org (Michael Fuhr) wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 23, 2005 at 10:58:46AM -0500, Thomas F.O'Connell wrote:
>>
>> It is generally not recommended that you kill processes with anything
>> stronger than HUP, which is (I believe) what kill sends by default.
>
> kill usually sends TERM by default, not HUP.
>
> (I say "usually" only because I haven't personally examined every
> implementation of kill in existence. Every one I've used sends
> TERM by default and I haven't heard of any that work otherwise.)

The only "normative" standard that would seem meaningful would be
POSIX. A quick "google" doesn't find anything relevant there.

The most relevant thing is pointers to the GNU utilities, which is
where the "kill" used on Linux comes from. The man page for that
indicates TERM as the default, and later has pointers to POSIX.1 as
its 'source of authority.'

I'd hazard the guess that perhaps that default was declared in POSIX,
which is at least a form of standard. It may not be normative for
BSD, but it is still instructive...

Have you ever had a "bad day" when you issued "kill -3" rather than
"kill 2"? I have also had the day when part of me wanted "kill it
now; kill -3", another part knew "No, you should just use kill -2, and
wait...", and my treacherous fingers wound up taking the wrong side in
the conflict ;-).
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