There are many switches other than 9 and can be used with kill command.
- SIGHUP (hangup)
Tells the program that the user disconnected (e.g. SSH session or terminal window was closed)
Usually does a graceful shutdown of the program.
- SIGINT (interrupt)
Sent when you hit CTRL+C
Usually means "stop what you're doing" - may or may not kill the program
- SIGTERM (terminate)
The default sent by kill and killall.
Usually terminates the program... sometimes after the program finishes whatever it's doing.
- SIGSTOP (stop)
Sent when you hit CTRL+Z
Pauses the program, discussed above
- SIGPIPE (pipe closed)
Tells the program that the the pipeline has closed.
Usually terminates the program.
For example cat /etc/passwd | head -n1 will send SIGPIPE to the cat process after the first line is printed, causing cat to terminate before finishing the whole file.