> Also, the program is called KILL so one could be forgiven for assuming it's main purpose is to KILL things... I think this is the source of the problem. kill

> Also, the program is called KILL so one could be forgiven for assuming it's main purpose is to KILL things... I think this is the source of the problem. kill really is just for sending signals. In the "Unix philosophy" there's no standard way to end processes, normally you send it SIGTERM and hope that it catches that, cleans up and exits. If it doesn't it could be a bug in the program, or maybe the program uses SIGTERM with slightly different semantics (eg Celery will wait for its children's tasks to finish, and does the "normal thing" of exiting as fast as possible when it gets two SIGTERMS); in any case I think the idea is that it's a weird, non-standard situation and the user needs to explicitly send SIGKILL (kill -9), since doing so might be dangerous.