50 points
13 points
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?
22 points
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
4 points
5 points
*
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.
4 points
