Hi,
Kill, by default, send SIGTERM (code 2) to the targeted process. The
default behavior for such signal is to terminate the process ("man 1
kill" at the prompt). However, processes can defaine a signal handler to
process SIGTERM to do whatever you want it to. In this case the process
will not terminate but resumed in the point where it was when the
handler was called.
Alternatively you may specify the code of the signal you want to send to
the process, such as in "kill -9 <pid>" or "kill -KILL <pid>". SIGKILL
cannot be handled by processes, and the default (and only) behavior is
to terminate the process. This is the "brute force" method., as no
cleanup handler will be called.