After starting from command line bitocoind, it can require minutes to have bitocoind to be real responsive, for example:
$ ./bitcoin-cli stop
error: {"code":-28,"message":"Activating best chain..."}

In such situation, I had sometimes to "kill -9" bitcoind to stop it.
I would like to be able to stop bitcoind in clean way.

p.s.:
$ uname -a
Darwin isghe.local 14.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 14.4.0: Thu May 28 11:35:04 PDT 2015; root:xnu-2782.30.5~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64