kill (1)

Leading comments

(The preceding line is a note to broken versions of man to tell
them to pre-process this man page with tbl)
Man page for kill.
Licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.
Written by Albert Cahalan; converted to a man page by
Michael K. Johnson

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man1/kill.1".)

NAME

kill - send a signal to a process

SYNOPSIS

kill [options] <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.

-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), skill(1)

STANDARDS

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

AUTHOR

Albert Cahalan 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