procps/man/kill.1

.\"
.\" Copyright (c) 2002-2023 Craig Small <csmall@dropbear.xyz>
.\" Copyright (c) 2011-2023 Jim Warner <james.warner@comcast.net>
.\" Copyright (c) 2011-2012 Sami Kerola <kerolasa@iki.fi>
.\" Copyright (c) 1998-2003 Albert Cahalan
.\"
.\" This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
.\" it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
.\" the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
.\" (at your option) any later version.
.\"
.TH KILL 1 "2023-01-16" "procps-ng" "User Commands"
.SH NAME
kill \- send a signal to a process
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B kill
[options] <pid> [...]
.SH DESCRIPTION
The default signal for kill is TERM.  Use
.B \-l
or
.B \-L
to list available signals.  Particularly useful signals include HUP,
INT, KILL, STOP, CONT, and 0.  Alternate signals may be specified in
three ways:
.BR \-9 ", " \-SIGKILL
or
.BR \-KILL .
Negative PID values may be used to choose whole process groups; see
the PGID column in ps command output.  A PID of
.B \-1
is special; it indicates all processes except the kill process itself
and init.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B <pid> [...]
Send signal to every <pid> listed.
.TP
.B \-<signal>
.TQ
.B \-s <signal>
.TQ
.B \-\-signal <signal>
Specify the
.B signal
to be sent.  The signal can be specified by using name or number.
The behavior of signals is explained in
.BR signal (7)
manual page.
.TP
\fB\-q\fR, \fB\-\-queue \fIvalue\fP
Use
.BR sigqueue (3)
rather than
.BR 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
.BR sigaction (2),
then it can obtain this data via the si_value field of the
siginfo_t structure.
.TP
\fB\-l\fR, \fB\-\-list\fR [\fIsignal\fR]
List signal names.  This option has optional argument, which
will convert signal number to signal name, or other way round.
.TP
.BR \-L , \ \-\-table
List signal names in a nice table.
.TP
.PD
.SH 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.
.SH EXAMPLES
.TP
.B kill \-9 \-1
Kill all processes you can kill.
.TP
.B kill \-l 11
Translate number 11 into a signal name.
.TP
.B kill -L
List the available signal choices in a nice table.
.TP
.B kill 123 543 2341 3453
Send the default signal, SIGTERM, to all those processes.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR kill (2),
.BR killall (1),
.BR nice (1),
.BR pkill (1),
.BR renice (1),
.BR signal (7),
.BR sigqueue (3),
.BR skill (1)
.SH STANDARDS
This command meets appropriate standards. The
.B \-L
flag is Linux-specific.
.SH AUTHOR
.UR albert@users.sf.net
Albert Cahalan
.UE
wrote kill in 1999 to replace a bsdutils one that was not standards
compliant.  The util-linux one might also work correctly.
.SH "REPORTING BUGS"
Please send bug reports to
.UR procps@freelists.org
.UE