kill command SIGKILL vs SIGTERM

there was a nice write up somewhere on here about... not using kill-9 all the time which is SIGKILL and explained the reasons for doing so, and then went on to explain an order in which one should proceed from least aggressive SIGTERM ending up eventually at SIGKILL or rebooting. **can someone post a link to that for me? i cannot find it** using kill -l to do a listing I receive as output on the terminal *this is kill dash lowecase L, and NOT dash numeral one* HUP INT QUIT ILL TRAP ABRT BUS FPE KILL USR1 SEGV USR2 PIPE ALRM TERM STKFLT CHLD CONT STOP TSTP TTIN TTOU URG XCPU XFSZ VTALRM PROF WINCH POLL PWR SYS RTMIN RTMIN+1 RTMIN+2 RTMIN+3 RTMAX-3 RTMAX-2 RTMAX-1 RTMAX *I spaced out the above for readability. This is from SLES 11.4 x86-64* Am I correct in assuming the order of which these signal names are printed from kill -l correspond to the number you provide the kill command, such that if I wanted the bad *KILL* I would do kill -9 and if I wanted the better choice of TERM that would be kill -15 ? - Is this the only way to find out these numbers on a given system? - Is there a better more universal way of verifying what signals are available on a given linux system {RHEL, SuSE, debian, ... some stripped down version of linux from *i don't know where* used on some piece of hardware}? - If I write code, where & how should one check something system level like this before assuming a signal is: first available, and then that kill -number corresponds to a specific signal? - is there a good source for learning about all these types of signals, and what should be expected to always be available, for a typical *Linux* operating sytem?