> -----Original Message-----
> From: Donna Garverick [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
[...]
> samba....  i guess most of these s/w packages 'know' what to do
> when they're killed (btw, could they have picked a worse name
> for this command?).  that is, they do a 'gracefullish'
> shutdown.  to them, abortjob is like a big, heavy sledge
> hammer.

As I understand it, the way "unix" thingies handle "kill" is that the kill
command actually generates a SIGNAL to the program.  A close look at the
kill command shows that you can SPECIFY exactly which SIGNAL to send -- the
two most common are SIGHUP and SIGKILL  (see "man kill" in the shell or your
local unix/linux command prompt)

SIGHUP (no, not a special interest group for Helpless Unix People) is the
"hang up" signal.  Most programs treat this as a way of allowing the user to
indicate "your configuration has changed, please re-read the file and act
accordingly"

SIGKILL is closer to the more drastic "sledgehammer" of ABORT/ABORTJOB.
There is also SIGTERM, I believe, but I don't recall this being used very
much. (at least, not for this purpose)

From a programming perspective, you can write your own "signal handlers"
that can trap things like SIGHUP and SIGKILL and act in a manner similar to
"the unix way" -- HUP causes a refresh of configuration options, and KILL
should correspond to an exit or quit command.

(in some cases, you can even cause your program to effectively IGNORE the
KILL signal...)