skill(1) — Linux manual page

SKILL(1)                      User Commands                     SKILL(1)

NAME

       skill, snice - send a signal or report process status

SYNOPSIS

       skill [signal-option] [other-option ...] expression

       snice [new-priority] [option ...] expression

DESCRIPTION

       These tools are obsolete and unportable.  The command syntax is
       poorly defined.  Consider using the killall, pkill, and pgrep
       commands instead.

       The default signal for skill 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 -KILL.

       The default priority for snice is +4.  Priority numbers range
       from +20 (slowest) to -20 (fastest).  Negative priority numbers
       are restricted to administrative users.

OPTIONS

       -f, --fast
              Fast mode.  This option has not been implemented.

       -i, --interactive
              Interactive use.  You will be asked to approve each
              action.

       -l, --list
              List all signal names.

       -L, --table
              List all signal names in a nice table.

       -n, --no-action
              No action; perform a simulation of events that would occur
              but do not actually change the system.

       -v, --verbose
              Verbose; explain what is being done.

       -w, --warnings
              Enable warnings.  This option has not been implemented.

       -h, --help
              Display help text and exit.

       -V, --version
              Display version information.

PROCESS SELECTION OPTIONS

       Selection criteria can be: terminal, user, pid, command.  The
       options below may be used to ensure correct interpretation.

       -t, --tty tty
              The next expression is a terminal (tty or pty).

       -u, --user user
              The next expression is a username.

       -p, --pid pid
              The next expression is a process ID number.

       -c, --command command
              The next expression is a command name.

       --ns pid
              Match the processes that belong to the same namespace as
              pid.

       --nslist ns,...
              list which namespaces will be considered for the --ns
              option.  Available namespaces: ipc, mnt, net, pid, user,
              uts.

SIGNALS

       The behavior of signals is explained in signal(7) manual page.

EXAMPLES

       snice -c seti -c crack +7
              +Slow down seti and crack commands.

       skill -KILL -t /dev/pts/*
              Kill users on PTY devices.

       skill -STOP -u viro -u lm -u davem
              Stop three users.

SEE ALSO

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

STANDARDS

       No standards apply.

AUTHOR

       Albert Cahalan ⟨albert@users.sf.net⟩ wrote skill and snice in
       1999 as a replacement for a non-free version.

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
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

procps-ng                      2023-08-19                       SKILL(1)

Pages that refer to this page: kill(1@@procps-ng), pgrep(1)

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