NAME

kill − send a signal to a process, or terminate a process

SYNOPSIS

kill [ −signal ] pid ...
kill −l

DESCRIPTION

kill sends the TERM (terminate, 15) signal to the processes with the specified pids. If a signal name or number preceded by ‘−’ is given as first argument, that signal is sent instead of terminate.  The signal names are listed by using the −l option, and are as given in <signal.h>, stripped of the common SIG prefix. 

The terminate signal will kill processes that do not catch the signal, so ‘kill −9 ...’ is a sure kill, as the KILL (9) signal cannot be caught.  By convention, if process number 0 is specified, all members in the process group (that is, processes resulting from the current login) are signaled (but beware: this works only if you use sh(1); not if you use csh(1).)  Negative process numbers also have special meanings; see kill(2V) for details.  The killed processes must belong to the current user unless he is the super-user. 

To shut the system down and bring it up single user the super-user may send the initialization process a TERM (terminate) signal by ‘kill 1’; see init(8).  To force init to close and open terminals according to what is currently in /etc/ttytab use ‘kill −HUP 1’ (sending a hangup signal to process 1). 

The shell reports the process number of an asynchronous process started with ‘&’ (run in the background).  Process numbers can also be found by using ps(1). 

kill is built in to csh(1); it allows job specifiers, such as ‘kill  % ...’, in place of kill arguments.  See csh(1) for details. 

OPTIONS

−l Display a list of signal names. 

FILES

/etc/ttytab

SEE ALSO

csh(1), ps(1), kill(2V), sigvec(2), init(8)

BUGS

A replacement for ‘kill  0’ for csh(1) users should be provided. 

Sun Release 4.1  —  Last change: 16 November 1987