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Manual page for KILL(1)

kill - send a signal to a process, or terminate a process

SYNOPSIS

kill [ -signal ] pid ...
kill -l

DESCRIPTION

kill sends the TERM (terminate, 15) signal to the processes with the specified pids. If a signal name or number preceded by `-' is given as first argument, that signal is sent instead of terminate. The signal names are listed by using the -l option, and are as given in <signal.h>, stripped of the common SIG prefix.

The terminate signal will kill processes that do not catch the signal, so `kill -9 ...' is a sure kill, as the KILL (9) signal cannot be caught. By convention, if process number 0 is specified, all members in the process group (that is, processes resulting from the current login) are signaled (but beware: this works only if you use sh.1 not if you use csh.1 Negative process numbers also have special meanings; see kill.2v for details. The killed processes must belong to the current user unless he is the super-user.

To shut the system down and bring it up single user the super-user may send the initialization process a TERM (terminate) signal by `kill 1'; see init.8 To force init to close and open terminals according to what is currently in /etc/ttytab use `kill -HUP 1' (sending a hangup signal to process 1).

The shell reports the process number of an asynchronous process started with `&' (run in the background). Process numbers can also be found by using ps.1

kill is built in to csh.1 it allows job specifiers, such as `kill % ...', in place of kill arguments. See csh.1 for details.

OPTIONS

-l: Display a list of signal names.

FILES

/etc/ttytab

BUGS

A replacement for `kill 0' for csh.1 users should be provided.