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[OM] Re: OT: a few Mac questions

Subject: [OM] Re: OT: a few Mac questions
From: "Bill Pearce" <bs.pearce@xxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 22:24:18 -0500
I thought mac's were supposed to be easy for the novice to use.
> I don't think you understood me.

The following seems very complex:

> "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) ::::
> 
And I was actually considering switching when I need a new computer...

Bill Pearce

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