KILL

Section: Linux Programmer's Manual (2)
Updated: 1997-09-14
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NAME

kill - send signal to a process

SYNOPSIS

#include <sys/types.h>


#include <signal.h>

int kill(pid_t pid, int sig);

DESCRIPTION

The kill system call can be used to send any signal to any process group or process.

If pid is positive, then signal sig is sent to pid.

If pid equals 0, then sig is sent to every process in the process group of the current process.

If pid equals -1, then sig is sent to every process except for the first one.

If pid is less than -1, then sig is sent to every process in the process group -pid.

If sig is 0, then no signal is sent, but error checking is still performed.

RETURN VALUE

On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.

ERRORS

EINVAL: An invalid signal was specified.
ESRCH: The pid or process group does not exist. Note that an existing process might be a zombie, a process which already committed termination, but has not yet been wait()ed for.
EPERM: The process does not have permission to send the signal to any of the receiving processes. For a process to have permission to send a signal to process pid it must either have root privileges, or the real or effective user ID of the sending process must equal the real or saved set-user-ID of the receiving process. In the case of SIGCONT it suffices when the sending and receiving processes belong to the same session.

BUGS

It is impossible to send a signal to task number one, the init process, for which it has not installed a signal handler. This is done to assure the system is not brought down accidentally.

CONFORMING TO

SVr4, SVID, POSIX.1, X/OPEN, BSD 4.3

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