NAME¶

kill - send a signal to a process

SYNOPSIS¶

kill [options] <pid> [...]

DESCRIPTION¶

The default signal for kill is TERM. Use -l or -L to list available signals. Particularly useful signals include HUP, INT, KILL, STOP, CONT, and 0. Alternate signals may be specified in three ways: -9, -SIGKILL or -KILL. Negative PID values may be used to choose whole process groups; see the PGID column in ps command output. A PID of -1 is special; it indicates all processes except the kill process itself and init.

OPTIONS¶

<pid> [...]

Send signal to every <pid> listed.

-<signal>

-s <signal>

--signal <signal>

Specify the signal to be sent. The signal can be specified by using name or number. The behavior of signals is explained in signal(7) manual page.

-q, --queue value

Use sigqueue(3) rather than kill(2) and the value argument is used to specify an integer to be sent with the signal. If the receiving process has installed a handler for this signal using the SA_SIGINFO flag to sigaction(2), then it can obtain this data via the si_value field of the siginfo_t structure.

-l, --list [signal]

List signal names. This option has optional argument, which will convert signal number to signal name, or other way round.

-L, --table

List signal names in a nice table.

NOTES¶

Your shell (command line interpreter) may have a built-in kill command. You may need to run the command described here as /bin/kill to solve the conflict.

If you use negative PID values, you will need to specify a signal as well so that kill knows if the option is for the PID or the signal number. For example, issuing the command with the single option -9 it is not clear if you mean signal 9 (SIGKILL) or process group 9.

EXAMPLES¶

kill -9 -1

Kill all processes you can kill.

kill -l 11

Translate number 11 into a signal name.

kill -L

List the available signal choices in a nice table.

kill 123 543 2341 3453

Send the default signal, SIGTERM, to all those processes.

kill -SIGTERM -123

Send the signal SIGTERM to process group 123. The signal name or number is required if specifying process groups with a negative PID.

SEE ALSO¶

kill(2), killall(1), nice(1), pkill(1), renice(1), signal(7), sigqueue(3), skill(1)

STANDARDS¶

This command meets appropriate standards. The -L flag is Linux-specific.

AUTHOR¶

Albert Cahalan wrote kill in 1999 to replace a bsdutils one that was not standards compliant. The util-linux one might also work correctly.

REPORTING BUGS¶

Please send bug reports to procps@freelists.org