I am running Solaris 9. I have a problem with kill command. I'm sort of teaching myself so this might be a really stupid thing. I logged in as a normal user, lets say ABC, and then did "su" to root. After becoming root, I tried to kill the process started by ABC by saying

kill -9 "pid of ABC"

but the problem is, it is shutting off the entire session and logging off "root" too. Is this essentially killing the shell itself? If so, how do I stay logged in as root and kill the other users shell or specific processes??

Help appreciated, I'm new to this, I'm dumb so open to constructive criticism

When you kill the shell in which you switched to root, you kill everything.

You need to open a new shell and from there you can kill any other shell without beeing loged out.

Start the shell with ksh, bash, or whatever shell you prefer.

here is another tip - don't get in the habit of using -9 (SIGKILL) every time you need to kill a process. This does not allow a process to shutdown normally and can cause problems. using -9 can be avoided in most situations and should really never be a first choice unless you know why your doing it.

@gnom: I guess I didn't start the new shell properly. I do remember changing to ksh, so, I am assuming I screwed up the command!! Thanks anyway.

@frank_rizzo: I am just getting started and my man pages are not set up right (I screwed up while installing too). Most forums suggested kill -9 to kill things quickly. So, it's not the proper way eh? I'll get there some day!! Thanks for the tip.