Is kill a service command?
 

Hello. I am a student taking a linux class and one of the home work questions read "How would you use the service command to kill the bigd daemon?" I am not asking for the answer. I just was wondering if I needed to research the kill command. So in other words my question is; Is the kill command considered a service command?

Hi,

Nope, kill is not what is meant, although kill could be part of the service command.

Hint: Ask yourself how a system stops/starts/restarts a daemon in a nice way.

Hope this helps.

This appears to be a distribution specific question. Not all Linux distributions use 'service' functionality, but this is really little more than a wrapper around the run-level architecture.

The answer to your question should prompt you to understand how that (run-level) behaves. As for the exact question you are trying to answer, I would really like to see how "service command" is defined.

The immediate instinct is that this is somehow related to run-level, but then it may be related to this: http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl5_services.htm

Listen...
 

in UNIX/Linux all processes communicate to each other using system of so-called signals. Some signals are traceable, it means that a process can catch the signal and respond (or react) and not-traceable (that go directly to process structure and remove the process). "kill" is the command of user level that sends the signal. you can see the list of available signal by "kill -l". "kill -9" will send "TERMINATION" signal to a process, means kill it, but it is only one of 15 signals. My advice, get Evi Nemeth book http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Administ...6866800&sr=8-1 or "Learn Linux" DVDs by UNIX Academy http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=...47&rnid=491286 they explain these subjects very well.

Many daemons know how catch specific signal, and let say re-read their configuration file (kill -1 is popular)

hope it helps

Hi,

You're confusing the "kill" command with the language used in the question. What it really means is - how would you normally stop the 'bigd' daemon using the "service" command? It's nothing to do with the process "kill" command.

@Bratmon: Isn't that a BSD specific command? Most linux bixes do not have a manual page for service.

Not BSD, just distro-specific. And the OP said he needed to use the service command.

B.Johnson, I too am a student probably taking the same class cause I have the same question on my homework. You have probably already passed the course (hopefully) so I am posting this for future students that might have the same question. You can find your answer on p.430 if you are using Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Fifth Edition book. If you are not, sorry...keep googling.

Good luck and don't worry, you will get it. Just keep working with it.