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 /bin/kill described in Section 2 but also allows symbolic job names. Stubborn processes can be killed using signal 9. See also "Job Control" at the end of this section.

Options

-l

List the signal names. (Used by itself.)

-signal

The signal number (from ps -f) or name (from kill -l).

Signals

Signals are defined in /usr/include/sys/signal.h and are listed here without the SIG prefix.

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 &

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