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.
# kill -l
1) SIGHUP 2) SIGINT 3) SIGQUIT 4) SIGILL
5) SIGTRAP 6) SIGABRT 7) SIGBUS 8) SIGFPE
9) SIGKILL 10) SIGUSR1 11) SIGSEGV 12) SIGUSR2
13) SIGPIPE 14) SIGALRM 15) SIGTERM 16) SIGSTKFLT
17) SIGCHLD 18) SIGCONT 19) SIGSTOP 20) SIGTSTP
21) SIGTTIN 22) SIGTTOU 23) SIGURG 24) SIGXCPU
25) SIGXFSZ 26) SIGVTALRM 27) SIGPROF 28) SIGWINCH
29) SIGIO 30) SIGPWR 31) SIGSYS 34) SIGRTMIN
35) SIGRTMIN+1 36) SIGRTMIN+2 37) SIGRTMIN+3 38) SIGRTMIN+4
39) SIGRTMIN+5 40) SIGRTMIN+6 41) SIGRTMIN+7 42) SIGRTMIN+8
43) SIGRTMIN+9 44) SIGRTMIN+10 45) SIGRTMIN+11 46) SIGRTMIN+12
47) SIGRTMIN+13 48) SIGRTMIN+14 49) SIGRTMIN+15 50) SIGRTMAX-14
51) SIGRTMAX-13 52) SIGRTMAX-12 53) SIGRTMAX-11 54) SIGRTMAX-10
55) SIGRTMAX-9 56) SIGRTMAX-8 57) SIGRTMAX-7 58) SIGRTMAX-6
59) SIGRTMAX-5 60) SIGRTMAX-4 61) SIGRTMAX-3 62) SIGRTMAX-2
63) SIGRTMAX-1 64) SIGRTMAX
Comments
SIGTERM is often numbered 15 while SIGKILL is often numbered 9
The available signals all have different names, and are mapped to certain numbers. It is important to note that the specific mapping between numbers and signals can vary between Unix implementations. SIGTERM is often numbered 15 while SIGKILL is often numbered 9.
Examples
A process can be sent a SIGTERM signal in four ways (the process ID is '1234' in this case):
kill 1234
kill -s TERM 1234
kill -TERM 1234
kill -15 1234
The process can be sent a SIGKILL signal in three ways:
kill -s KILL 1234
kill -KILL 1234
kill -9 1234
Other useful signals include HUP, TRAP, INT and ALRM. HUP sends the SIGHUP signal. Some daemons, including Apache and Sendmail, re-read configuration files upon receiving SIGHUP, so the kill command may be used for this too.