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Full Discussion: Kill command
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Kill command Post 302894199 by rbatte1 on Monday 24th of March 2014 10:39:29 AM
Old 03-24-2014
A very harsh way to learn is the difference between kill %1 and kill 1

This should be fine:-
Code:
# sleep 100 &
[1]     5638
# jobs
[1] +  Running                 sleep 100 &
# ps -f
     UID   PID    PPID  C    STIME TTY       TIME COMMAND
    root 17654   17653  0 13:33:49 pts/tv    0:00 -ksh
    root 5638    17654  0 14:28:48 pts/tv    0:00 sleep 100
    root 5840    17654  1 14:29:27 pts/tv    0:00 ps -f
    root 17653   986    0 13:33:49 pts/tv    0:00 telnetd -b /etc/herald
# kill %1
[1] + Terminated               sleep 100 &
#

I need to make this next bit clear:-
Do not run this!
Code:
# sleep 100 &
[1]     5638
# jobs
[1] +  Running                 sleep 100 &
# ps -f
     UID   PID    PPID  C    STIME TTY       TIME COMMAND
    root 17654   17653  0 13:33:49 pts/tv    0:00 -ksh
    root 5638    17654  0 14:28:48 pts/tv    0:00 sleep 100
    root 5840    17654  1 14:29:27 pts/tv    0:00 ps -f
    root 17653   986    0 13:33:49 pts/tv    0:00 telnetd -b /etc/herald
# kill 1
.
.
.

.... or your server with fail in the instant. Not even a crash in most cases, it just fails.

Even process 5 may be very early and a very critical process. You may be lucky and process 5 may have already terminated, but it's very risky stuff all the same. If you are the root user, you can terminate any process, so single digit errors on a kill command can be catastrophic. Imagine terminating an application serving process, a database query or worse a critical database service sudo as pmon for Oracle or oinit for Informix etc.


With great power comes great responsibility and errors can cause irrevocable damage.


Robin
 

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kill(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   kill(1)

Name
       kill - send a signal to a process

Syntax
       kill [-sig] processid...
       kill -l

Description
       The command sends the TERM (terminate, 15) signal to the specified processes.  If a signal name or number preceded by `-' is given as first
       argument, that signal is sent instead of terminate.  For further information, see

       The terminate signal kills processes that do not catch the signal; `kill -9 ...' is a sure kill, as the KILL (9) signal cannot  be  caught.
       By convention, if process number 0 is specified, all members in the process group (that is, processes resulting from the current login) are
       signaled.  This works only if you use and not if you use To kill a process it must either belong to you or you must be superuser.

       The process number of an asynchronous process started with `&' is reported by the shell.  Process numbers can also be  found  by  using	It
       allows job specifiers ``%...''  so process ID's are not as often used as arguments.  See for details.

Options
       -l   Lists  signal  names.  The signal names are listed by `kill -l', and are as given in /usr/include/signal.h, stripped of the common SIG
	    prefix.

See Also
       csh(1), ps(1), kill(2), sigvec(2)

																	   kill(1)
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