rkill(1)

rkill1

Control processes and their descendants

Part of pslist(1).

Usage

pslist [pid/name ...]

pslist {-h | --help}

pslist {-v | --version}

rkill [-SIG] pid/name ...

rrenice [+/-] pri pid/name ...

Overview

The pslist utility examines the list of current processes to find a specified process and all its descendants. A process may be specified either by name or by process ID. If no arguments are given, pslist displays a list of the whole process tree. For each process specified on the command line, pslist outputs a line containing the process ID, the command name, and the PIDs of all the descendants (and their descendants, etc.).

When invoked as rkill, this utility does not display information about the processes, but sends them all a signal instead. If not specified on the command line, a terminate (SIGTERM) signal is sent.

When invoked as rrenice, this utility does not display information about the processes, but attempts to set their nice value instead.

Return values

The pslist utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

Releases

9 releases since Debian 6.0 (Squeeze); the text changed 1 time.

  1. 6.0–8
  2. 9–Arch

History

The pslist utility was written by Peter Pentchev in 2000.

Authors

Peter Penchev ⟨[email protected]⟩

From pslist 1.4.0-4 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.