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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | NOTES | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | STANDARDS | AUTHOR | REPORTING BUGS | COLOPHON |
KILL(1) User Commands KILL(1)
kill - send a signal to a process
kill [options] <pid> [...]
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.
<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.
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.
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.
kill(2), killall(1), nice(1), pkill(1), renice(1), signal(7), skill(1)
This command meets appropriate standards. The -L flag is Linux- specific.
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.
Please send bug reports to ⟨procps@freelists.org⟩
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⟩.
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procps-ng October 2011 KILL(1)