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    kill -9 means to me: "Begone, foul process, away with thee!", upon which the process will cease to be. Immediately. Commented Mar 29, 2010 at 22:18
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    On most *nixes that I'm aware of, kill -9 cannot be intercepted and gracefully handled by any program no matter what language it was written in. Commented Mar 29, 2010 at 22:18
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    @Begui: in addition to what the others have commented and answered, IF your Unx OS doesn't instantly kill *AND REGAIN ALL RESOURCES used by the program being kill -9'ed, well... The OS is broken. Commented Mar 30, 2010 at 0:39
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    About the kill -9 command, the manpage says more precisely: "9 KILL (non-catchable, non-ignorable kill)". SIGKILL a signal that is handled by the OS, not the application. Commented Jun 18, 2012 at 11:47
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    Just kill is not the same as Ctrl-C, as kill without specifying which signal to send will send SIGTERM, whereas Ctrl-C sends SIGINT. Commented Mar 26, 2017 at 22:49