> From: Dan Mitchell <danmitchell@xxxxxxxx>
>
>> You don't have to do "kill -9". Do "force quit" from the Finder, and
>> if that doesn't work the first time, do it again. The first one does
>> a "kill -HUP" and the second one does a "kill -KILL" and will then
>> update itself.
>
> That's why I'm asking -- if "force quit" worked, I wouldn't have to
> be
> using command prompts to get rid of processes.
I don't think you understood me.
"Force quite" works just fine. You NEVER want to use -9 as your first
attempt to kill something! That may well be causing all sorts of other
problems! "kill -9" is an unconditional process termination, without
closing open files and network connections. If you "-9" a video
player, most likely the video file still has an open file descriptor
in the buffer pool, and may have problems when you try to re-open it,
or as a minimum will hold system resources that should be freed. Do it
enough times, and things will slow to a crawl until you re-start.
Since you seem determined to use Terminal without knowing these basic
things about UNIX, I'd suggest you check out "man kill" to see what
the various parameters do.
The GUI-based "force quit" first attempts a "kill -1" also known as
SIGHUP. (Or maybe it's SIGTERM -- I forget.) This interrupts a running
process and causes it to jump to its SIGHUP signal handler, which all
processes are suppose to have. There, it is supposed to release
allocated memory, close file descriptors and perform an orderly
shutdown.
If that doesn't work, the second invocation of "force quit" does a
SIGKILL, which DOES NOT signal the running process in any way -- it
merely deletes it from the running process table. The process may then
show up in ps as a "zombie" process -- one that is still holding
system resources, but is effectively out of system control.
If you have a misbehaving program that consistently requires a SIGKILL
to get rid of it, you should re-boot often. This is all just basic
UNIX 101. Linux behaves the same way. It is not a Mac issue, really.
:::: Jan (running Leopard Beta, and don't have my signatures moved
over yet) ::::
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