What's the difference between SIGKILL and SIGSTOP?

Question

The manual describes SIGKILL and SIGSTOP like this:

SIGKILL             9    Term    Kill signal
SIGTERM            15    Term    Termination signal
SIGSTOP      17,19,23    Term    Stop the process

and states:

The signals SIGKILL and SIGSTOP cannot be caught, blocked, or ignored.

but what's the difference between the 2 signals?

Answer 1

SIGKILL kills a process and cannot be caught

SIGTERM kills a process but can be caught to do a graceful exit

SIGSTOP suspends the process until you do a SIGCONT

Answer 2

As is found on Wikipedia

SIGKILL

The SIGKILL signal is sent to a process to cause it to terminate immediately. In contrast to SIGTERM and SIGINT, this signal cannot be caught or ignored, and the receiving process cannot perform any clean-up upon receiving this signal.

SIGSTOP

The SIGSTOP signal instructs the operating system to stop a process for later resumption.

Answer 3

As the name suggests, SIGKILL kill the process instead of SIGSTOP which stop the process until the SIGCONT be called (to continue the process).