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any tech reason not to kill or killall?
Authored by: BananaFish on Jun 16, '04 04:16:06AM

I think the advantage of using killall instead of kill is that you can kill a process by name and not by PID. So, instead of having to figure out what PID Mail is using, you can simply run killall Mail.

One disadvantage to using killall might be that, if you have more than one user logged in through Fast User Switching, you could run the risk of killing off more than one instance of Mail. The killall man page states: "By default, it will send a TERM signal to all processes with a real UID identical to the caller of killall that match the name procname. The super-user is allowed to kill any process." In other words, as long as you're shelled in as yourself and you just run killall as yourself and not as root, you should be fine. I tried it out on my own system and it worked as the man page describes.

My OS X installation has a man page for kill, by the way.

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