I really want to like this. But SIGKILL is such a special instrument in the administrator's toolbox that I don't want it automatically sent after a short timeout. Moreover I don't think anyone should want that. This tool will hide or allow you to ignore important issues with your system.

I do unequivocally like the blocking behaviour though, I might implement that for myself.

Edit: so just something like this:

  function killwait() {
    kill $1
    while ps -p $1 &>/dev/null; do
      sleep 1
    done
  }