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is the kill -9 necessary?
Authored by: bluehz on Feb 21, '03 08:40:40AM

Good point and I actually thought of that as soon as I posted it. It might be better to use a kill -3 (quit) or kill -15 (terminate). I tried uisng kill -3 and it had no effect - but kill -15 worked fine. Does anyone know the pros and cons of doing a kill -15 on a running app?



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Kill -15 is clean
Authored by: watson on Feb 21, '03 01:29:55PM

kill -15 (SIGTERM) is the default signal sent by the kill program, allowing the program to do a clean exit, save its state, data and so on.
Kill -9 on the other hand, it only needed for hung applications, when it's not responding to anything else. The -9 (SIGKILL) signal is not catchable and the application is given no chance of saving any state or data.

To get a list of available signals, try a 'kill -l' (without quotes) in the terminal.

HTH,
Henrik



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Kill -15 is clean
Authored by: sxtxixtxcxh on Apr 13, '04 01:02:31AM
i get a mail from the cron daemon saying:

/Users/stitch/ical_icon: line 16:  4458 Terminated              /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/MacOS/iCal
i'd hate to have a new one each day...

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