phpman > man > KILL(1)

KILL(1)                                     User Commands                                    KILL(1)



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  indi‐
       cates 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 inte‐
              ger  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 num‐
              ber 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.

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.

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  ⟨albert AT users.net⟩  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 AT freelists.org⟩



procps-ng                                    2020-04-24                                      KILL(1)