kill

kill [options] ID

Terminate each specified process ID or job ID. You must own the process or be a privileged user. This built-in is similar to /usr/bin/kill described in Chapter 2 but also allows symbolic job names. Stubborn processes can be killed using signal 9. See also the earlier section "Job Control."

Options

-l

List the signal names. (Used by itself.)

-signal

The signal number (from /usr/include/sys/signal.h) or name (from kill -l). With a signal number of 9, the kill is absolute.

Signals

Signals are defined in /usr/include/sys/signal.h and are listed here without the SIG prefix. You probably have more signals on your system than the ones shown here.

HUP     1       hangup
INT     2       interrupt
QUIT    3       quit
ILL     4       illegal instruction
TRAP    5       trace trap
IOT     6       IOT instruction
EMT     7       EMT instruction
FPE     8       floating point exception
KILL    9       kill
BUS     10      bus error
SEGV    11      segmentation violation
SYS     12      bad argument to system call
PIPE    13      write to pipe, but no process to read it
ALRM    14      alarm clock
TERM    15      software termination (the default signal)
USR1    16      user-defined signal 1
USR2    17      user-defined signal 2
CLD     18      child process died
PWR     19      restart after power failure

Examples

If you've issued the following command:

44% nroff -ms report > report.txt &
[1] 19536               csh prints job and process IDs

you can terminate it in any of the following ways:

45% kill 19536            Process ID
45% kill %                Current job
45% kill %1               Job number 1
45% kill %nr              Initial string
45% kill %?report         Matching string