I just tried it: "killall -TERM TextEdit" works as I expect, producing no error message but just telling TextEdit to die asap. "killall -QUIT" indeed does behave different. But SIGTERM is what's usually sent if you do not give an explicit signal.

On the other hand it's right that on SIGTERM TextEdit won't ask you for saving your half-finished document, it will discard all changes. But that's what I expect if I say "dear program, please terminate asap".

Now I think I understand your hint and what it's for, I got it wrong after the first read. But I am still pretty sure that most OS X programs (application or not) do handle SIGTERM and do some clean up before exiting.

For further reading, you might be interested in this.

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