| .\" Copyright 1994 Salvatore Valente (svalente@mit.edu) |
| .\" Copyright 1992 Rickard E. Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) |
| .\" May be distributed under the GNU General Public License |
| .TH KILL 1 "14 October 1994" "Linux Utilities" "Linux Programmer's Manual" |
| .SH NAME |
| kill \- terminate a process |
| .SH SYNOPSIS |
| .B kill |
| .RB [ \-s |
| .IR signal | \fB\-p\fP ] |
| .RN [ \-a ] |
| .RB [ \-\- ] |
| .IR pid ... |
| .br |
| .B kill -l |
| .RI [ signal ] |
| .SH DESCRIPTION |
| The command |
| .B kill |
| sends the specified signal to the specified process or process group. |
| If no signal is specified, the TERM signal is sent. The TERM signal |
| will kill processes which do not catch this signal. For other processes, |
| it may be necessary to use the KILL (9) signal, since this signal cannot |
| be caught. |
| .PP |
| Most modern shells have a builtin kill function, with a usage rather similar |
| to that of the command described here. The `-a' and `-p' options, |
| and the possibility to specify pids by command name is a local extension. |
| .PP |
| If sig is 0, then no signal is sent, but error checking is still performed. |
| .SH OPTIONS |
| .TP |
| .IR pid ... |
| Specify the list of processes that |
| .B kill |
| should signal. Each |
| .I pid |
| can be one of five things: |
| |
| .RS |
| .TP |
| .I n |
| where |
| .I n |
| is larger than 0. The process with pid |
| .I n |
| will be signaled. |
| .TP |
| .B 0 |
| All processes in the current process group are signaled. |
| .TP |
| .B -1 |
| All processes with pid larger than 1 will be signaled. |
| .TP |
| .BI - n |
| where |
| .I n |
| is larger than 1. |
| All processes in process group |
| .I n |
| are signaled. When an argument of the form `-n' is given, |
| and it is meant to denote a process group, |
| either the signal must be specified first, or the argument must be preceded |
| by a `--' option, otherwise it will be taken as the signal to send. |
| .TP |
| .I commandname |
| All processes invoked using that name will be signaled. |
| .RE |
| .TP |
| .BI \-s " signal" |
| Specify the signal to send. |
| The signal may be given as a signal name or number. |
| .TP |
| .B \-l |
| Print a list of signal names. These are found in |
| .I /usr/include/linux/signal.h |
| .TP |
| .B \-a |
| Do not restrict the commandname-to-pid conversion to processes |
| with the same uid as the present process. |
| .TP |
| .B \-p |
| Specify that |
| .B kill |
| should only print the process id (pid) |
| of the named processes, and not send any signals. |
| .SH "SEE ALSO" |
| .BR bash (1), |
| .BR tcsh (1), |
| .BR kill (2), |
| .BR sigvec (2), |
| .BR signal (7) |
| .SH AUTHOR |
| Taken from BSD 4.4. The ability to translate process names to process |
| ids was added by Salvatore Valente <svalente@mit.edu>. |
| .SH AVAILABILITY |
| The kill command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available from |
| ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/. |
