HP-UX Reference (11i v3 07/02) - 1 User Commands A-M (vol 1)

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kill(1) kill(1)

15 SIGTERM Terminate Terminate; can be trapped

24 SIGSTOP Stop Pause the process; cannot be trapped

25 SIGTSTP Terminal stop Pause the process; can be trapped

26 SIGCONT Continue Run a stopped process

SIGNULL (0), the null signal, invokes error checking but no signal is actually sent. This can be used to

test the validity or existence of pid.

SIGTERM (15), the (default) terminate signal, can be trapped by the receiving process, allowing the

receiver to execute an orderly shutdown or to ignore the signal entirely. For orderly operations, this is the

preferred choice.

SIGKILL (9), the kill signal, forces a process to terminate immediately. Since

SIGKILL cannot be

trapped or ignored, it is useful for terminating a process that does not respond to

SIGTERM.

The receiving process must belong to the user of the sending process, unless the user has appropriate

privileges.

As a single special case, the continue signal

SIGCONT can be sent to any process that is a member of the

same session as the sending process.

RETURN VALUE

Upon completion,

kill returns with one of the following values:

0 At least one matching process was found for each pid operand, and the speciﬁed signal was suc-

cessfully processed for at least one matching process.

>0 An error occurred.

EXAMPLES

The command:

kill 6135

signals process number 6135 to terminate. This gives the process an opportunity to exit gracefully (remov-

ing temporary ﬁles, etc.).

The following equivalent commands:

kill -s SIGKILL 6135

kill -s KILL 6135

kill -s 9 6135

kill -SIGKILL 6135

kill -KILL 6135

kill -9 6135

terminate process number 6135 abruptly by sending a SIGKILL signal to the process. This tells the ker-

nel to remove the process immediately.

WARNINGS

If a process hangs during some operation (such as I/O) so that it is never scheduled, it cannot die until it is

allowed to run. Thus, such a process may never go away after the kill. Similarly, defunct processes (see

ps(1)) may have already ﬁnished executing, but remain on the system until their parent reaps them (see

wait(2)). Using kill to send signals to them has no effect.

Some non-HP-UX implementations provide kill only as a shell built-in command.

DEPENDENCIES

This manual entry describes the external command /usr/bin/kill and the built-in kill command of

the POSIX shell (see sh-posix(1)). Other shells, such as C and Korn (see csh(1) and ksh(1) respectively),

also provide kill as a built-in command. The syntax for and output from these built-ins may be different.