Why number 9 in kill -9 command in unix? [closed]

See the wikipedia article on Unix signals for the list of other signals. SIGKILL just happened to get the number 9.

You can as well use the mnemonics, as the numbers:

kill -SIGKILL pid

There were 8 other signals they came up with first.

I think a better answer here is simply this:

mike@sleepycat:~☺  kill -l 1) SIGHUP   2) SIGINT   3) SIGQUIT  4) SIGILL   5) SIGTRAP   6) SIGABRT  7) SIGBUS   8) SIGFPE   9) SIGKILL 10) SIGUSR111) SIGSEGV 12) SIGUSR2 13) SIGPIPE 14) SIGALRM 15) SIGTERM16) SIGSTKFLT   17) SIGCHLD 18) SIGCONT 19) SIGSTOP 20) SIGTSTP21) SIGTTIN 22) SIGTTOU 23) SIGURG  24) SIGXCPU 25) SIGXFSZ26) SIGVTALRM   27) SIGPROF 28) SIGWINCH    29) SIGIO   30) SIGPWR31) SIGSYS  34) SIGRTMIN    35) SIGRTMIN+1  36) SIGRTMIN+2  37) SIGRTMIN+338) SIGRTMIN+4  39) SIGRTMIN+5  40) SIGRTMIN+6  41) SIGRTMIN+7  42) SIGRTMIN+843) SIGRTMIN+9  44) SIGRTMIN+10 45) SIGRTMIN+11 46) SIGRTMIN+12 47) SIGRTMIN+1348) SIGRTMIN+14 49) SIGRTMIN+15 50) SIGRTMAX-14 51) SIGRTMAX-13 52) SIGRTMAX-1253) SIGRTMAX-11 54) SIGRTMAX-10 55) SIGRTMAX-9  56) SIGRTMAX-8  57) SIGRTMAX-758) SIGRTMAX-6  59) SIGRTMAX-5  60) SIGRTMAX-4  61) SIGRTMAX-3  62) SIGRTMAX-263) SIGRTMAX-1  64) SIGRTMAX    

As for the "significance" of 9... I would say there is probably none. According to The Linux Programming Interface(p 388):

Each signal is defined as a unique (small) integer, starting sequentially from 1. These integers are defined in with symbolic names of the form SIGxxxx . Since the actual numbers used for each signal vary across implementations, it is these symbolic names that are always used in programs.