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    the compelling reason is that if you get in the habit of sending SIGKILL, then when you get to a program which will, for example, corrupt an important database for you or your company, you'll really regret it. kill -9 has its use, as a last-resort terminator, emphasis on last-resort; admins that use it before the last-resort a) do not understand being an admin too well, and b) shouldn't be on a production system. Commented Mar 9, 2011 at 12:39
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    @Mikel Another thing to through it, sometimes it's best to trick an app into cleaning itself up with a signal like SIGQUIT or SIGSEGV if it won't respond to SIGINT/SIGTERM. For example, a full screen 3-D app or even Xorg. Using SIGQUIT, it won't have a chance to clean-up anything, but tricking it into thinking a segment fault happen and it will feel it has no choice but to clean up and exit. Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 11:10
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    @Arcege Do you think that using a database that corrupts data if killed with -9 is a database worth using after all? iirc, mysql, bdb, pg, etc... all behave well when killed with -9. Commented Jan 28, 2014 at 6:52
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    killall -9 java ftw Commented Jan 28, 2014 at 7:10
  • 35
    @dhruvbird: just because your DBs are supposed to come equipped with bullet-proof vests doesn't mean you should shoot them if you don't need to. While you may be right that it's not as risky as Arcege seems to say, I think his point still stands that it's risky and should be a last resort. Commented Jan 30, 2014 at 15:34