kill - send a signal to a process
kill [options] <pid> [...]
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.
- <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.
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.
- 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(2),
killall(1),
nice(1),
pkill(1),
renice(1),
signal(7),
sigqueue(3),
skill(1)
This command meets appropriate standards. The
-L flag is Linux-specific.
Albert Cahalan wrote
kill in 1999 to replace a bsdutils one that was not standards compliant. The
util-linux one might also work correctly.
Please send bug reports to
[email protected]