Is it true that when a kill is sent to a process, the process to be killed can decide whether to terminate itself or not?

kill sends a signal to the designated processes
man signal
man kill
man 7 signal # or man -s 2 signal

I am trying to create a script that will kill a process. I have a file (proc.txt) which contains the process number but I don't seem to be able to tie the content of the file to the "kill -9" command to kill it.

a small

> cat proc.txt | xargs -l1 kill -9

should do it (and work with several PID lines too if any).
But if this doesn't work you probably have unsufficient permissions to kill the process involved.

Script to kill processes:
 
#!/bin/ksh
if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
process_name=$1
ps_count=`ps -ef | grep -v 'grep' | grep -v 'kill' | grep -i -c $process_name`
echo "Process count: $ps_count"
set -A array_name `ps -ef | grep -i $process_name | grep -v 'grep' | grep -v 'kill' | awk '{print $2}' | sort -u`
print "ps -ef | grep -i $process_name | grep -v 'grep' | grep -v 'kill' | awk '{print \$2 \$8}' | sort -u -n"

print "${array_name[*]}"
kill_count=0
while [ $kill_count -lt $ps_count ]
do
kill -9 ${array_name[$kill_count]}
# print "kill -15 ${array_name[$kill_count]}"
((kill_count=kill_count+1))
done
else
print "Usage: $0 process_name"
print ""
fi

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