kill (1)

kill [options] <pid> [...]

The default signal for kill is TERM. Use -l or -L to list available signals. Particularly useful signals include HUP, INT, KILL, STOP, CONT, and 0. Alternate signals may be specified in three ways: -9, -SIGKILL or -KILL. Negative PID values may be used to choose whole process groups; see the PGID column in ps command output. A PID of -1 is special; it indicates all processes except the kill process itself and init.

<pid> [...]

Send signal to every <pid> listed.

-<signal> -s <signal> --signal <signal>

Specify the signal to be sent. The signal can be specified by using name or number. The behavior of signals is explained in signal(7) manual page.

-l, --list [signal]

List signal names. This option has optional argument, which will convert signal number to signal name, or other way round.

-L,--table

List signal names in a nice table.

Your shell (command line interpreter) may have a built-in kill command. You may need to run the command described here as /bin/kill to solve the conflict.

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(2), killall(1), nice(1), pkill(1), renice(1), signal(7), skill(1)

This command meets appropriate standards. The -L flag is Linux-specific.

Albert Cahalan

wrote kill in 1999 to replace a bsdutils one that was not standards compliant. The util-linux one might also work correctly.

Please send bug reports to