On: Why not kill -9 a process?

[DHowett]

Only if you've enabled it. If you've not, the process will terminate unceremoniously (in a mechanism borne entirely out of hatred for users.)

This is my favourite part of dd: The "will I receive a status report or will I terminate my long-running copy?" gamble.

[jsight → DHowett]

Is that a BSD thing? I've never had to enable it on Linux to avoid killing the process.

[rahimnathwani → jsight]

Me neither, on debian.