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Kill Usage

kill -HUP PID
kill -TERM PID
kill -KILL PID
(I did not write this, I just found it and posted it here for my own reference.)
Why does everyone jump straight to -9?

DO NOT USE -9 AS YOUR FIRST KILL SIGNAL.

Try a nice friendly -HUP … perhaps a little stronger -TERM.

If, for some reason, these don’t work, knock a little louder with -KILL (ie: -9), but don’t whine if something else gets hosed due to the strong signal (not to scare anyone, it’s unlikely that anything critical is happening anyway, any more than just writing a file– but you could leave resources locked/in use (ie: memory, etc)).

Also, use -HUP and -TERM and -KILL …. you’ll be thankful when you miss your kill -1 and do a kill 1 instead … you’ll use -HUP from then on (well, maybe not on a pda, but on a production server etc.)

UNIX kill signals

Signal

Name

Signal

Number

Action
HUP 1 Hangup
INT 2 Interrupt
QUIT 3 Quit (dumps core file)
ILL 4 Illegal instruction (dumps core file)
TRAP 5 Breakpoint trap (dumps core file)
IOT 6 I/O trap (dumps core file)
EMT 7 Emulator trap (dumps core file)
FPE 8 Floating Point Exception (dumps core file)
KILL 9 Kill with extreme prejudice
BUS 10 Bus error (dumps core file)
SEGV 11 Segment Violation (dumps core file)
SYS 12 Bad system call argument (dumps core file)
PIPE 13 Write to nonexistent pipe
ALRM 14 Alarm clock timeout
TERM 15 Terminate
USR1 16 User defined signal
USR2 17 User defined signal
CHLD 18 Child status (aka CLD)
PWR 19 Power failure or restart
WINCH 20 Window size change
URG 21 Urgent socket condition
IO 22 Socket I/O (aka POLL)
STOP 23 Stop from non-tty process (see CONT)
TSTP 24 Stop from tty process (see CONT)
CONT 25 Continue a stopped process
TTIN 26 Waiting for background tty input (see CONT)
TTOU 27 Waiting for background tty output (see CONT)
VTALRM 28 Virtual alarm timeout
PROF 29 Profiling timeout
XCPU 30 CPU time limit exceeded (dumps core file)
XFSZ 31 File size limit exceeded (dumps core file)

jlim0930

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