XK0-006 System Management Practice Question
A technician needs to kill a process with PID 1234 that is not responding to normal termination. Which command sends SIGKILL?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
kill -9 1234
kill -9 sends SIGKILL, which forcefully terminates the process.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
kill 1234
Why it's wrong here
Bare kill defaults to SIGTERM (signal 15), the graceful request the unresponsive process already ignored, so it will not force termination. Default SIGTERM suits well-behaved processes that clean up on request; SIGKILL (signal 9) is needed to terminate a stuck process immediately.
- ✗
kill -15 1234
Why it's wrong here
Signal 15 is SIGTERM, the polite termination request the process already ignored, so it fails again here. SIGTERM suits graceful shutdowns where the process releases resources cleanly; SIGKILL (signal 9) is required when a process refuses to terminate.
- ✓
kill -9 1234
Why this is correct
SIGKILL (signal 9) cannot be caught, blocked, or ignored by the process, so the kernel terminates PID 1234 immediately. This satisfies the stem's constraint that the process is unresponsive to normal termination, unlike SIGTERM (15), which the process may handle or defer.
- ✗
kill -1 1234
Why it's wrong here
Signal 1 is SIGHUP, historically a hangup that many daemons interpret as a configuration reload, so it will not terminate the process. SIGHUP suits prompting services to reread their configuration files; SIGKILL (signal 9) is required to force termination of an unresponsive process.
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