[Explained] Task Manager: Terminate or Stop or Kill?

[markfilipak]

IMHO this is not a helpful reply for a newbies

Uh?

The answer was in the page in the link. What's unhelpful about that?

Sheng-Chieh is right, Buzz. Such an article is not helpful to a newbie. Why is that? Well, there's really many reasons. But I'm not going to critique it in a pragmatic manner, such as that it's missing thus-and-such, or that thus-and-such is confusing. Too many times those sorts or pragmatic discussions devolve into pissing contests. Suffice to say: The cited posting attempts to be helpful, but it lacks a newbie's point of view. You, Buzz, are not a professional writer schooled in rhetoric, so you would probably find it very difficult to identify the posting's deficiencies. Accept that someone skilled in rhetoric develops the ability to step back from even their own writings to see it's jaundiced point of view and to expand that point of view. The rhetorical skills are almost mechanical.

But in a sense, you are both right. What you posted was helpful, Buzz, but also it was not knowledge-appropriate for newbies, and so, it's helpfulness was limited.

[MtnDewManiac]

IMHO this is not a helpful reply for a newbies

Uh?

The answer was in the page in the link. What's unhelpful about that?

Sheng-Chieh is right, Buzz. Such an article is not helpful to a newbie. Why is that? Well, there's really many reasons. But I'm not going to critique it in a pragmatic manner, such as that it's missing thus-and-such, or that thus-and-such is confusing. Too many times those sorts or pragmatic discussions devolve into pissing contests. Suffice to say: The cited posting attempts to be helpful, but it lacks a newbie's point of view. You, Buzz, are not a professional writer schooled in rhetoric, so you would probably find it very difficult to identify the posting's deficiencies. Accept that someone skilled in rhetoric develops the ability to step back from even their own writings to see it's jaundiced point of view and to expand that point of view. The rhetorical skills are almost mechanical.

But in a sense, you are both right. What you posted was helpful, Buzz, but also it was not knowledge-appropriate for newbies, and so, it's helpfulness was limited.

I found the article to be helpful. But it was helpful in a contributory fashion. IOW, once I knew that (some of) the terms it mentioned were the same ones that the OP was asking about, it gave me some additional information/reading. It didn't, by itself, answer the question (this is an assumption; my knowledge at the start of the thread might have been less than the OP's, lol), because it made a fundamental assumption that I knew that the three terms were the same even though their names were technically different. To me, it'd be like if I had asked if New York is a nice place to live, and someone had pointed me to a link about Brooklyn. It'd have been better if they'd have prefaced it with, "Brooklyn is in NY, and here is a link about it." As far as the thread topic goes, there was information presented here that was either not in the link, or which was presented differently. "Everything helped" - once I had it all. So thanks to everyone, including the OP for asking a question that I had wondered about!

Regards,
MDM

[karlchen]

Hello, markfilipak.

Task Manager 1.0.1 has 4 context menu choices for a running task:
'Terminate'
'Stop'
'Kill' and
'Priority' (6 choices)

• Terminate: send a friendly "kill" signal to the process. This is the same as "kill -15 <PID>" on the commandline, whereby <PID> has to be replaced by the process number. A friendly kill signal gives the process a chance of doing some cleaning up and saving open files before really terminating.
• Stop is actually Suspend: The process execution is suspended. The process remains ina RAM, but execution gets frozen till you "unsuspend" the process.
• Kill: send an unfriendly and unconditional "kill" signal to the process. This is the same as "kill -9 <PID>" on the commandline. "kill -9" does not wait for the process to confirm anything, it simply kills it right on the spot.
• Priority: There are 6 levels of priorities which you can assign to a running process. The priority will influence the amount of CPU time which a process will get.

Note:
Only the owner of a process can execute any of the actions above on a given process.
Exception: User root can run any action on anybody's processes.

HTH,
Karl

[markfilipak]

• Terminate: send a friendly "kill" signal to the process. This is the same as "kill -15 <PID>" on the commandline, whereby <PID> has to be replaced by the process number. A friendly kill signal gives the process a chance of doing some cleaning up and saving open files before really terminating.
• Stop is actually Suspend: The process execution is suspended. The process remains ina RAM, but execution gets frozen till you "unsuspend" the process.
• Kill: send an unfriendly and unconditional "kill" signal to the process. This is the same as "kill -9 <PID>" on the commandline. "kill -9" does not wait for the process to confirm anything, it simply kills it right on the spot.
• Priority: There are 6 levels of priorities which you can assign to a running process. The priority will influence the amount of CPU time which a process will get.

Note:
Only the owner of a process can execute any of the actions above on a given process.
Exception: User root can run any action on anybody's processes.

Thank you, Karl. That's perfect.