kill - send a signal to a process
Contents
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.
Examples
kill-9-1
Kill all processes you can kill.
kill-l11
Translate number 11 into a signal name.
kill-L
List the available signal choices in a nice table.
kill12354323413453
Send the default signal, SIGTERM, to all those processes.
Name
kill - send a signal to a process
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, --queuevalue
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.
Reporting Bugs
Please send bug reports to procps@freelists.org
procps-ng 2023-01-16 KILL(1)
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.
Synopsis
kill [options] <pid> [...]
