x SuSE Linux 13.1-RELEASE x
x SuSE Linux 13.1-RELEASEx
KILL(1) User Commands KILL(1)
NAME
kill - terminate a process
SYNOPSIS
kill [-signal|-s signal|-p] [-q value] [-a] [--] pid|name...
kill -l [number] | -L
DESCRIPTION
The command kill sends the specified signal to the specified processes
or process groups. If no signal is specified, the TERM signal is sent.
This TERM signal will kill processes that do not catch it; for other
processes it may be necessary to use the KILL signal (number 9), since
this signal cannot be caught.
Most modern shells have a builtin kill function, 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.
ARGUMENTS
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 sig-
naled.
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.
OPTIONS
-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/sig-
nal.h
-L, --table
Similar to -l, but it will print signal names and their corre-
sponding numbers.
-a, --all
Do not restrict the commandname-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.
The --pid option is automatically enabled when the kill command
is invoked with the name of pid. This functionality is depre-
cated, and will be removed in March 2016.
-q, --queue value
Use sigqueue(2) 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.
NOTES
It is not possible to send a signal to an explicitly selected thread in
a multithreaded process using the kill(2) syscall. If kill(2) is used
to send a signal to a thread group, then the kernel selects an arbi-
trary member of the thread group that has not blocked the signal. For
more details see clone(2), the CLONE_THREAD description.
The command kill(1) as well as syscall kill(2) accept a TID (thread ID,
see gettid(2)) as an argument. In this case the kill behavior is not
changed and the signal is also delivered to the thread group rather
than to the specified thread.
RETURN CODES
kill has the following return codes:
0 success
1 failure
64 partial success (when more than one process specified)
SEE ALSO
bash(1), tcsh(1), kill(2), sigvec(2), signal(7)
AUTHORS
Salvatore Valente <svalente@mit.edu>
Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>
The original version was taken from BSD 4.4.
AVAILABILITY
The kill command is part of the util-linux package and is available
from Linux Kernel Archive <ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-
linux/>.
util-linux July 2014 KILL(1)
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