Linux.com

Thanks for this article. I have one nit to pick. You've advocated the use of "kill -9" to stop the darkstat process, and that's a very bad idea. Normally, just a simple "kill" will work. The "- 9" option to kill is for those special cases when a process is stuck, and won't die with a normal kill. A "kill -9" is rather ungraceful, and does not allow a process to clean up as it exits, and so should in general be avoided. It's like using a bulldozer for the task when a small hammer will do. It pains me everytime that I get a newbie engineer, and when asked to stop a process, immediately begins typing "kill -9 ...". I sigh, and know I've got to teach this guy a thing or two about Linux/Unix process management. Anand Buddhdev

#