After identifying a runaway process, what is a prudent first step to terminate it gracefully?

After identifying a runaway process, what is a prudent first step to terminate it gracefully?

• A. Terminate gracefully with kill -TERM <PID>.
• B. Forcefully kill with kill -9 <PID>.
• C. Reboot the system immediately.
• D. Ignore and monitor.

Answer: (A)

The basic idea is to stop the process in a controlled, clean way. Sending a graceful termination signal gives the program a chance to finish what it’s doing, close files, flush buffers, release locks, and exit properly. That’s what the TERM signal does, so using kill -TERM <PID> is the best first step. If the process doesn’t respond to TERM, you would then move to a forced kill, which stops it immediately but doesn’t allow cleanup, risking data loss or leftover resources. Rebooting is too drastic for a single misbehaving process, and simply ignoring it doesn’t terminate it.

The basic idea is to stop the process in a controlled, clean way. Sending a graceful termination signal gives the program a chance to finish what it’s doing, close files, flush buffers, release locks, and exit properly. That’s what the TERM signal does, so using kill -TERM is the best first step. If the process doesn’t respond to TERM, you would then move to a forced kill, which stops it immediately but doesn’t allow cleanup, risking data loss or leftover resources. Rebooting is too drastic for a single misbehaving process, and simply ignoring it doesn’t terminate it.