Don’t use “kill -9”

In the past, any time I wanted to stop an errant process on unix, I just used “kill -9”. By default. Without thinking about it much.

Then a colleague commented to me that you should never use kill -9. It terminates the process with no chance to shutdown in an orderly manner, and so can leave things in a bad state, such as corrupting files. “But what else am I supposed to do!?” I naively asked.

There are of course many other options for the kill command (see links below), but here are some alternatives you can try, in the order you may want to try them.

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Tags: bash, commandline, kill, unix