[ryguytilidie]

This always seemed so overhyped to me. I did hundreds of interviews at Google and I never once asked anyone a question anything like the ones described. It was generally stuff like "oh hey, you're going to do deep work on our unix systems? What is the difference between kill and kill -15?" We also didn't care about GPA. This all seems like super old information if it was ever true at all.

[iyulaev]

What is the difference between kill and kill -15?

Well, for one, the second isn't syntactically correct.

I can't decide what's worse, brainteasers or brainless trivia questions.

[spudlyo]

Pedantic nonsense. Most of the time when you're using kill you're going be using the bash shell built-in, where it is syntactically correct.

kill [-s sigspec | -n signum | -sigspec] [pid | jobspec] ...

Even so, with /bin/kill -sigspec is still valid and common usage, even if it is not documented in the manpage.