this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Nah, we gotta kill, preferably with -9. 🤣

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

You know I’ve known for decades that -9 is basically “nuke it from orbit”, but does anyone know what the “9” actually means or where it came from?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's the number of the signal sent, 9 is for SIGKILL. You can send various signals with kill, and depending on how application was made it may react on all signals with dying, or meaningfully process most of them. Afaik, SIGKILL can't be processed by the app, and it always means just that: "die already".

Checked in Wikipedia, that's about right but there are more details I left out, mostly because didn't know about them, too: POSIX signals

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Thank you! That’s what I was looking for.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

In languages like C, your application code can register what is called a signal handler. These functions get called when the process receives a signal. You could do something like reload a config file for example, without the user needing to stop and restart the process.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

You can use kill -l (lowercase L) to see a list of signals. But IIRC it’s the same as -KILL.

EDIT: fixed the signal name.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

TERM is the default (15). 9 is KILL

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago