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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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That is not true. If you use SIGKILL (9) it ends the process totally. Other signals don't do that. And per default the cli commands don't send SIGKILL, but SIGTERM. It nicely asks the program to terminate and the program is supposed to write down it's data and do what it needs to do when signaled like that. You'd need to attach a '-9' to kill it without warning. (Even if the command is called 'kill'.)
A lot of GUI apps unfortunately don't catch SIGTERM, so it doesn't make much of a difference. A lot of them put their "exited normally" into the "the window was closed" handler.
For GQRX that might even be intentional, it's very unstable at times, and you do kill it pretty often. So they probably assume if it got SIGTERM, it was frozen and the WM offered the user to kill it and clicked yes.
Sure, ~~if GUI apps don't handle it they just keep running. It's just asking them to terminate.~~ [Edit: I'll try that]
(We could just have a look at the code of GQRX in specific or just try it.)
The default behaviour for SIGTERM (and most other signals) when unhandled is to terminate the process, so you might as well be sending SIGKILL. It won't keep running unless specifically coded to catch the signal and do nothing with it.
then it sounds like what is being killed has another child or parallel process that isn't getting killed by the command used. Or Sigterm 15 is needed for graceful shutdown of process
It's more than an "ask" - if it's not handled then the application will still shutdown. SIGTERM is "trapable" by the application though and should be used to safely terminate.
They'll also want to try SIGINT as that's what ctrl+c sends. The application may handle that one instead.