When should I not kill -9 a process?

Generally, you should use kill (short for kill -s TERM, or on most systems kill -15) before kill -9 (kill -s KILL) to give the target process a chance to clean up after itself. (Processes can't catch or ignore SIGKILL, but they can and often do catch SIGTERM.) If you don't give the process a chance to finish what it's doing and clean up, it may leave corrupted files (or other state) around that it won't be able to understand once restarted.

strace/truss, ltrace and gdb are generally good ideas for looking at why a stuck process is stuck. (truss -u on Solaris is particularly helpful; I find ltrace too often presents arguments to library calls in an unusable format.) Solaris also has useful /proc-based tools, some of which have been ported to Linux. (pstack is often helpful).

Randal Schwartz used to frequently post "Useless use of (x)" on lists. One such post was about kill -9. It includes reasons and a recipe to follow. Here is a reconstructed version (quoted below).

(Quote abomination)

No no no. Don't use kill -9.

It doesn't give the process a chance to cleanly:

1) shut down socket connections

2) clean up temp files

3) inform its children that it is going away

4) reset its terminal characteristics

and so on and so on and so on.

Generally, send 15, and wait a second or two, and if that doesn't work, send 2, and if that doesn't work, send 1. If that doesn't, REMOVE THE BINARY because the program is badly behaved!

Don't use kill -9. Don't bring out the combine harvester just to tidy up the flower pot.

Just another Useless Use of Usenet,

(.signature)

It should always be OK to do kill -9, just like it should always be OK to shutdown by pulling the power cable. It may be anti-social, and leave some recovery to do, but it ought to work, and is a power tool for the impatient.

I say this as someone who will try plain kill (15) first, because it does give a program a chance to do some cleanup -- perhaps just writing to a log "exiting on sig 15". But I won't accept any complaint about ill-behaviour on a kill -9.

The reason: plenty of customers do it to things programmers would prefer then don't. Random kill -9 testing is a good and fair test scenario, and if your system doesn't handle it, your system is broken.