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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | ARGUMENTS | OPTIONS | NOTES | RETURN CODES | SEE ALSO | AUTHORS | AVAILABILITY | COLOPHON |
KILL(1) User Commands KILL(1)
kill - terminate a process
kill [-signal|-s signal|-p] [-q value] [-a] [--] pid|name...
kill -l [number] | -L
The command kill sends the specified signal to the specified
processes or process groups.
If no signal is specified, the TERM signal is sent. The default
action for this signal is to terminate the process. This signal
should be used in preference to the KILL signal (number 9), since a
process may install a handler for the TERM signal in order to perform
clean-up steps before terminating in an orderly fashion. If a
process does not terminate after a TERM signal has been sent, then
the KILL signal may be used; be aware that the latter signal cannot
be caught, and so does not give the target process the opportunity to
perform any clean-up before terminating.
Most modern shells have a builtin kill command, with a usage rather
similar to that of the command described here. The --all, --pid, and
--queue options, and the possibility to specify processes by command
name, are local extensions.
If signal is 0, then no actual signal is sent, but error checking is
still performed.
The list of processes to be signaled can be a mixture of names and
PIDs.
pid Each pid can be one of four things:
n where n is larger than 0. The process with PID n is
signaled.
0 All processes in the current process group are
signaled.
-1 All processes with a PID larger than 1 are signaled.
-n where n is larger than 1. All processes in process
group n are signaled. When an argument of the form
'-n' is given, and it is meant to denote a process
group, either a signal must be specified first, or the
argument must be preceded by a '--' option, otherwise
it will be taken as the signal to send.
name All processes invoked using this name will be signaled.
-s, --signal signal
The signal to send. It may be given as a name or a number.
-l, --list [number]
Print a list of signal names, or convert the given signal
number to a name. The signals can be found in /usr/include/
linux/signal.h
-L, --table
Similar to -l, but it will print signal names and their
corresponding numbers.
-a, --all
Do not restrict the command-name-to-PID conversion to
processes with the same UID as the present process.
-p, --pid
Only print the process ID (PID) of the named processes, do not
send any signals.
--verbose
Print PID(s) that will be signaled with kill along with the
signal.
-q, --queue value
Use sigqueue(3) rather than kill(2). The value argument is an
integer that is sent along 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_sigval field of the siginfo_t structure.
Although it is possible to specify the TID (thread ID, see gettid(2))
of one of the threads in a multithreaded process as the argument of
kill, the signal is nevertheless directed to the process (i.e., the
entire thread group). In other words, it is not possible to send a
signal to an explicitly selected thread in a multithreaded process.
The signal will be delivered to an arbitrarily selected thread in the
target process that is not blocking the signal. For more details,
see signal(7) and the description of CLONE_THREAD in clone(2).
kill has the following return codes:
0 success
1 failure
64 partial success (when more than one process specified)
bash(1), tcsh(1), sigaction(2), kill(2), sigqueue(3), signal(7)
Salvatore Valente ⟨svalente@mit.edu⟩
Karel Zak ⟨kzak@redhat.com⟩
The original version was taken from BSD 4.4.
The kill command is part of the util-linux package and is available
from Linux Kernel Archive
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩.
This page is part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux
utilities) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have a
bug report for this manual page, send it to
util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
2017-07-05. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML ver‐
sion 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 man‐
ual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
util-linux July 2014 KILL(1)
Pages that refer to this page: fuser(1), killall(1), pgrep(1), pmsignal(1), skill(1), tcpdump(1), xargs(1), kill(2), sigaction(2), signal(2), posix_spawn(3), signal(7), ldattach(8), lsof(8)