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kill -9 overkill
Authored by: sjk on Sep 10, '04 04:47:04PM
Killing the process with the kill (kill -9 pid) command usually works on hung processes. If not sometimes kill -HUP pid will make the process behave (long enough to kill it) or exit.

kill -KILL (aka "-9") is best saved as the last resort when other signals have failed to kill a process. And kill -HUP won't kill a process that kill -KILL didn't, at least not on any Unix-based systems I've used.

kill -9 is often misunderstood and misused, as explained in places like:

kill -9
Useless use of kill -9

And MacOSXHints could consider publishing this as a separate hint to help slow the propagation of disinformation in the OS X community. :-)

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