The Unix Attitude 39 have the same name, namely “latex,” because they are all LaTeX jobs. Thus, “kill -9 latex” would be ambiguous. Like most operating systems, Unix has a command to list your jobs, mnemonically named “jobs.” The output of jobs looks something like this: zvona@rice-chex jobs [1] - Stopped latex [2] - Stopped latex [3] + Stopped latex This readily lets you associate particular LaTeX jobs with job num- bers, displayed in the square brackets. If you have had your thinking influenced by less well-thought-out operating systems, you may be thinking at this point that “kill -9 1” would kill job 1 in your listing. You’ll find, however, that it actually gives you a friendly error message: zvona@rice-chex kill -9 1 1: not owner The right argument to kill is a process id. Process ids are numbers like 18517. You can find the process id of your job using the “ps” command, which lists jobs and their process ids. Having found the right process id, you just: zvona@rice-chex kill -9 18517 zvona@rice-chex [1] Killed latex Notice that Unix gives you the prompt before telling you that your job has been killed. (User input will appear after the line beginning with “[1]”.) This illustrates another Unix design principle: • Tell the user no more than he needs to know, and no earlier than he needs to know it. Do not burden his cognitive capacities with excess information. I hope this little exercise has been instructive for you. I certainly came away from my learning experience deeply impressed with the Unix design philosophy. The elegance, power, and simplicity of the Unix kill command should serve as a lesson to us all.

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