this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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Programmer Humor

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[โ€“] cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 117 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (14 children)

While the meme is very funny, it is technically incorrect. Linux has two major ways of terminating a process. When Linux wants a process to terminate execution (for whatever reason) it first sends the SIGTERM signal to the process, which basically "asks" the process to terminate itself. This has the advantage, that the process gets the chance to save its state in a way, that the execution can continue at another time. If the process however ignores the SIGTERM signal at some point Linux will instead forcefully terminate the execution using the SIGKILL signal. This represents what the image shows.

Before someone gets mat at me: I know, that there are like 50 more Signals relevant to this, but wanted to keep it simple.

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