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kill(1) — Linux manual page

KILL(1)                       User Commands                      KILL(1)

NAME

       kill - send a signal to a process

SYNOPSIS

       kill [option ...] pid ...

DESCRIPTION

       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.

OPTIONS

       <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.  In
              addition, if signal is zero, no signal is sent, but
              existence and permission checks are still performed; this
              can be used to check for the existence of a process ID or
              process group ID that the caller is permitted to signal.

       -q, --queue value
              Use sigqueue(3) rather than kill(2) and the value argument
              is used to specify an integer to be sent 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_value field of the
              siginfo_t structure.

       -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.

NOTES

              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.

EXAMPLES

       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.

SEE ALSO

       kill(2), killall(1), nice(1), pkill(1), renice(1), signal(7),
       sigqueue(3), skill(1)

STANDARDS

       This command meets appropriate standards. The -L flag is Linux-
       specific.

AUTHOR

       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.

REPORTING BUGS

       Please send bug reports to ⟨procps@freelists.org⟩.

COLOPHON

       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⟩.
       This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps.git⟩ on 2024-06-14.  (At
       that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
       the repository was 2024-06-04.)  If you discover any rendering
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       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

procps-ng                      2023-12-27                        KILL(1)