procps/kill.1

'\" t
.\" (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
.TH KILL 1 "October 2011" "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\-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 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