Re: kill -9 <pid of X>

Geert Uytterhoeven (Geert.Uytterhoeven@cs.kuleuven.ac.be)
Wed, 12 Aug 1998 18:56:59 +0200 (CEST)

On Wed, 12 Aug 1998, Kenneth Albanowski wrote:
> May I therefore ask (as devil's advocate, please realize) why the kernel
> prevents init from receiving unwanted signals? Surely there is no reason
> root shouldn't be able to SIGKILL init, as you "could have killed the
> machine in easier ways", and we seem to be talking about the same level of
> mistake (accidentally killing the wrong process).

I guess you're talking about process 1? On most systems it's `init' :-)

That's the first process. All other processes are children of process 1. If you
kill process 1, the machine has nothing more to do. Hence it makes sense not
being able to kill #1.

Greetings,

Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven                     Geert.Uytterhoeven@cs.kuleuven.ac.be
Wavelets, Linux/{m68k~Amiga,PPC~CHRP}  http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~geert/
Department of Computer Science -- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven -- Belgium




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