Subject: Re: Warning from AV software about kill.exe

From: Thomas Rast <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:45:37 +0100

Erik Blake <[email-masked]> writes:

> I'm running git under Win7 64. As I selected "Repository|Visualize all
> branch history" in the git gui, my AV software (Trustport) trapped the
> bin\kill.exe program for "trying to modify system global settings
> (time, timezone, registry quota, etc.)"
>
> Does anyone know the details of this process and what it's function
> is? First time I've seen it, though I'm a relatively new user.

'kill' is a standard unix utility that sends signals to processes, in
particular signals that cause the processes to exit or be killed
forcibly by the kernel, hence the name.  (I don't know how the windows
equivalent works under the hood, but presumably it's something similar.)

git-gui and gitk use kill to terminate background worker processes that
are no longer needed because you closed the window their output would
have been displayed in, etc.

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch