How do I send a KILL signal to a process under UNIX operating systems?
Use the kill command to send a signal to each process specified by a pid (process identifier). The default signal is SIGTERM (terminate the process).
Syntax
kill PID kill -s signalName PID kill -9 PID
Common UNIX Signal Names and Numbers
All available UNIX signals have different names, and are mapped to certain numbers as described below.
| Number | Name | Description | Used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | SIGNULL | Null | Check access to pid |
| 1 | SIGHUP | Hangup | Terminate; can be trapped |
| 2 | SIGINT | Interrupt | Terminate; can be trapped |
| 3 | SIGQUIT | Quit | Terminate with core dump; can be |
| 9 | SIGKILL | Kill | Forced termination; cannot be trapped |
| 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 |
| 26 | SIGCONT | Continue | Run a stopped process |
Note the specific mapping between numbers and signals can vary between Unix implementations, please see the manual page entry signal(5), by typing the following command:
man 5 signal
Examples: Send a Kill Single To Process ID 1414
Use the following command to kill pid 4242 and exit gracefully:
kill 4242
To find pid of any job or command use ps command:
ps | grep command ps aux | grep command ps aux | grep apache
The following all are equivalent commands with -9 SIGKIL (i.e forcefully kill 1414 process):
kill -s SIGKILL 1414 kill -s KILL 1414 kill -s 9 1414 kill -SIGKILL 1414 kill -KILL 1414
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