NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | NOTES | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | STANDARDS | AUTHOR | REPORTING BUGS | COLOPHON

KILL(1)                         User Commands                        KILL(1)

NAME         top

       kill - send a signal to a process

SYNOPSIS         top

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

DESCRIPTION         top

       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         top

       <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.
       -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         top

              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         top

       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         top

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

STANDARDS         top

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

AUTHOR         top

       Albert Cahalan ⟨albert@users.sf.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         top

       Please send bug reports to ⟨procps@freelists.org⟩

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the procps-ng (/proc filesystem utilities)
       project.  Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps⟩.  If you have a bug report for
       this manual page, see 
       ⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/blob/master/Documentation/bugs.md⟩.
       This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository 
       ⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps.git⟩ on 2017-07-05.  If you dis‐
       cover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
       believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or
       you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
       COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail
       to man-pages@man7.org
procps-ng                       October 2011                         KILL(1)