kill -9 (one for the geeks)

A lot of time at University was spent playing around with Unix, reading UNIX Network Programming Volumes One AND Two. I still have those books, they pretty much taught me how the internet really works and still believe anyone who hasn’t read them still wouldn’t really understand or appreciate it.

A command that I used a lot back in those days was kill. It is used to send signals to processes and was particularly useful for killing processes that wouldn’t die (programming error or otherwise). The command kill -9 sends a non-blocking signal to a process telling it to die, here’s a screenshot of me killing an apache instance for no particular reason other than to show it in action –

Anyway, a rapper named ‘Monzy’ has created this song about it which is about as geeky as you can get, other than my fsck t-shirt –