Jan Steinman wrote:
> 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.
That's a fair point, but the reason I default to kill -9 is because
I've never seen kill -anythingelse ever do anything useful. Sure,
ideally there's signal handlers and whatnot waiting around, but whatever
they're meant to do doesn't work -- heck, the builtin cp process in OSX
doesn't handle them properly when reading from a wonky USB card, because
I've tried kill-9'ing a cp process, and the thing wouldn't die.
Possibly I should get out of that habit, but I first got into it on
Solaris 10 (sheesh, no, it's 15.. now I feel old) years or so ago at
university, and through that, Irix, various Linuxes, and OSX, I've never
had any joy with any lower level of kill than -9 -- because I'm only
using it on processes that are dead.
> 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.
That's what I wound up doing [1], and it solves the problems -- I just
was hoping to avoid rebooting. That said, Macs do boot up nice and fast,
which makes it less annoying. (though my one ergonomic gripe with Mac
hardware [1] is that the flush power button on G4 towers is
ergonomically horrible -- I put that box under the desk at work, and I
always end up having to grovel around under there to find the power
button by eye because I can't find it by touch).
-- dan
[1] Well, strictly speaking, I have to hold the power button down until
the Mac physically restarts itself [2], because the
killed-by-USB-storage Finder process won't die during a software-only
shutdown or with a force quit; that's why I was wondering if there's
anything special about Finder that would need more care when restarting it.
[2] It's a laptop, so I can't just pull the power cable out -- I suppose
I could do that and then remove the battery, but that feels like the
sort of thing that's a very bad idea..
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