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Development Tools Console Foundations Processes Killing Processes

What's the difference between 'kill -KILL' and 'kill -TERM'

As above please!

1 Answer

Seth Kroger
Seth Kroger
56,413 Points

-TERM sends a signal to the process to end, and will trigger any cleanup routines programmed into the running application to tidy up before exiting. -KILL (aka -9) will kill the process immediately without any cleanup. This is sometimes necessary if the process is really stuck and -TERM doesn't work.