The kill() system call sends the signal given by sig to pid, a process or a group of processes. The sig
argument may be one of the signals specified in sigaction(2) or it may be 0, in which case error checking
is performed but no signal is actually sent. This can be used to check the validity of pid.
For a process to have permission to send a signal to a process designated by pid, the user must be the
super-user, or the real or saved user ID of the receiving process must match the real or effective user
ID of the sending process. A single exception is the signal SIGCONT, which may always be sent to any
process with the same session ID as the sender. In addition, if the security.bsd.conservative_signalssysctl(9) is set to 1, the user is not a super-user, and the receiver is set-uid, then only job control
and terminal control signals may be sent (in particular, only SIGKILL, SIGINT, SIGTERM, SIGALRM, SIGSTOP,
SIGTTIN, SIGTTOU, SIGTSTP, SIGHUP, SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2).
If pid is greater than zero:
The sig signal is sent to the process whose ID is equal to pid.
If pid is zero:
The sig signal is sent to all processes whose group ID is equal to the process group ID of the
sender, and for which the process has permission; this is a variant of killpg(2).
If pid is -1:
If the user has super-user privileges, the signal is sent to all processes excluding system
processes (with P_SYSTEM flag set), process with ID 1 (usually init(8)), and the process sending
the signal. If the user is not the super user, the signal is sent to all processes which the
caller has permissions to, excluding the process sending the signal. No error is returned if any
process could be signaled.
If the process number is negative but not -1, the signal is sent to all processes whose process group ID
is equal to the absolute value of the process number. This is a variant of killpg(2).