Hi all,

I was going through the book "Hacking Ubuntu" by Neil Krawetz, in this
book it is said that never do kill -9 -1 as root.

in my office i tried this command as root on an RHEL4 machine

but there was'nt any system crash as i expected only the x-server got
crashed, and the commands like ps, ls were n't giving any o/p.

when i rebooted the machine everything was back to normal

my question why init process wasn't killed ?

aarklon@gmail.com :

> I was going through the book "Hacking Ubuntu" by Neil Krawetz, in this
> book it is said that never do kill -9 -1 as root.
>
> in my office i tried this command as root on an RHEL4 machine
>
> but there was'nt any system crash as i expected only the x-server got
> crashed, and the commands like ps, ls were n't giving any o/p.
>
> when i rebooted the machine everything was back to normal
>
> my question why init process wasn't killed ?

"A PID of -1 is special; it indicates all processes except the kill process
itself and init."

Next time, read "man 1 kill" before asking ...

--
Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters.
(Rosa Luxemburg)