TKILL(1)

📦 version 7.1.4, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💅 TKILL — okay bestie, time to shut it DOWN

So like. You know that LAM session you started with hboot(1)? Yeah. This is the girl whose whole job is ending it. On one node. Locally. That's it, that's the vibe. ✨

🎀 SYNOPSIS

tkill [-dhvN] [-f killfile]

🦋 OPTIONS

  • -d — turn ON debugging mode. And lowkey it implies -v too, so you get the chattiness for free. You'll get to see the final disposition of every single process. Iconic for when you're nosy (affectionate).
  • -h — print the command help menu. Your little safety net. 🫶
  • -v — be verbose. She will talk. 💬
  • -N — pretend!! Do NOT take action. It's giving dress rehearsal, not the real show. 🙈
  • -f killfile — use killfile as the name of the kill file. Yes, you get to name your own. Very main character.

🌸 DESCRIPTION

The tkill tool terminates the LAM session that hboot(1) started — but only on the local node, okay? Not the whole cluster. Just here. 💅

Here's the tea: tkill uses a kill file that the LAM kernel made. That file has the process identifiers of every LAM process in it, in ASCII format. Then a SIGHUP signal (see signal(3)) gets sent to every process listed in that kill file. One by one. Every. Single. One.

After that, tkill waits a short period of time for each process to die. Like, respectfully giving them a moment. If you add the debug option, you can literally watch the final disposition of each process. The mission is accomplished if all processes end up dead. That's the whole win condition. 🔥

Now here's the spicy part: in LAM, the first process to be killed is always the kernel. Periodt. And when the kernel receives its termination signal, it propagates that signal to all of its constituent processes. So tkill will ordinarily be racing the kernel to kill all the other processes. It's giving competitive. 🏁

But wait — that redundant aspect of tkill is exactly what makes it useful! Because of it, you can use tkill as a general purpose tool in association with hboot(1). So like. It's not a bug, bestie, it's a feature. 🧚

🍓 FILES

  • /tmp/lam-$USER@hostname — the kill file, created by the kernel. Where $USER is the userid, and hostname is the name of the local machine. 💖

🌈 SEE ALSO

⚠️ Heads up: tkill terminates things. For real. If you're not about that life, use -N and just pretend. 🙈

and that's the whole page, babe 💖 this was LAM 7.1.4, from July, 2007 — yeah she's vintage, she's archival, she's still slaying. no cap. 💅✨👑

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