2 .\" (The preceding line is a note to broken versions of man to tell
3 .\" them to pre-process this man page with tbl)
5 .\" Licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.
6 .\" Written by Albert Cahalan; converted to a man page by
8 .TH KILL 1 "November 21, 1999" "Linux" "Linux User's Manual"
10 kill \- send a signal to a process
15 kill pid ... Send SIGTERM to every process listed.
16 kill -signal pid ... Send a signal to every process listed.
17 kill -s signal pid ... Send a signal to every process listed.
18 kill -l List all signal names.
19 kill -L List all signal names in a nice table.
20 kill -l signal Convert a signal number into a name.
21 kill -V,--version Show version of program
25 The default signal for kill is TERM. Use -l or -L to list available signals.
26 Particularly useful signals include HUP, INT, KILL, STOP, CONT, and 0.
27 Alternate signals may be specified in three ways: -9 -SIGKILL -KILL.
28 Negative PID values may be used to choose whole process groups; see the
29 PGID column in ps command output. A PID of -1 is special; it indicates
30 all processes except the kill process itself and init.
33 The signals listed below may be available for use with kill.
34 When known constant, numbers and default behavior are shown.
39 Name Num Action Description
41 0 0 n/a exit code indicates if a signal may be sent
45 KILL 9 exit this signal may not be blocked
53 STKFLT exit may not be implemented
54 PWR ignore may exit on some systems
58 TSTP stop may interact with the shell
59 TTIN stop may interact with the shell
60 TTOU stop may interact with the shell
61 STOP stop this signal may not be blocked
62 CONT restart continue if stopped, otherwise ignore
69 SYS core may not be implemented
70 EMT core may not be implemented
71 BUS core core dump may fail
72 XCPU core core dump may fail
73 XFSZ core core dump may fail
77 Your shell (command line interpreter) may have a built-in kill command.
78 You may need to run the command described here as /bin/kill to solve
86 Kill all processes you can kill.
92 Translate number 11 into a signal name.
98 List the available signal choices in a nice table.
102 .B "kill 123 543 2341 3453"
104 Send the default signal, SIGTERM, to all those processes.
108 pkill(1) skill(1) kill(2) renice(1) nice(1) signal(7) killall(1)
111 This command meets appropriate standards. The -L flag is Linux-specific.
114 Albert Cahalan <albert@users.sf.net> wrote kill in 1999 to replace a
115 bsdutils one that was not standards compliant. The util-linux one might
118 Please send bug reports to <procps-feedback@lists.sf.net>