topic Re: Difference between Kill -9 and Kill -15 in Operating System - HP-UX

Difference between Kill -9 and Kill -15

Amith_2 — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 06:08:46 GMT

We use shut down scripts to kill many of our back ground process during end of business day. In those scripts there are processes which are killed using the value -15. Could anyone please tell me where we use kill -15 and kill -9 and what is the difference between them.

Re: Difference between Kill -9 and Kill -15

Henk Geurts — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 06:12:07 GMT

from man kill
9 SIGKILL Kill Forced termination; cannot be trapped
15 SIGTERM Terminate Terminate; can be trapped

regards,

Re: Difference between Kill -9 and Kill -15

Robert-Jan Goossens — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 06:12:53 GMT

Hi,

Check this thread.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=118528

Regards,
Robert-Jan

Re: Difference between Kill -9 and Kill -15

Cheryl Griffin — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 07:34:23 GMT

kill -15 allows the process to clean up behind itself. kill -9 is rather brute force and can leave orphaned processes. You're likely to have zombies and defunct (potentially processes owned by init which can only be removed with a reboot ) with kill -9.

Re: Difference between Kill -9 and Kill -15

Kent Ostby — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 07:40:03 GMT

Amith --

I personally use just plain kill which does a kill -15 first and then if that doesnt work, I'll use kill -9.

Checking the various shutdown scripts, I find that the only ones using kill -9 are:

/sbin/init.d/SnmpHpunix:
/sbin/init.d/SnmpMaster:
/sbin/init.d/SnmpMib2:
/sbin/init.d/SnmpTrpDst:
/sbin/init.d/emsa:
/sbin/init.d/hparray:
/sbin/init.d/nfs.client:

The others are just using the default "kill -15".

You may have other scripts using kill -9 depending on what you have installed.

Best regards,

Kent M. Ostby