NAME
kill —
send signal to a process
LIBRARY
library “libc”
SYNOPSIS
#include
<sys/types.h>
#include <signal.h>
int
kill(pid_t
pid, int sig);
DESCRIPTION
Thekill()
function sends the signal given by sig to
pid, a process or a group of processes.
Sig may be one of the signals specified in
sigaction(2) or it may be 0, in which case error checking is
performed but no signal is actually sent. This can be used to check the
validity of pid.
For a process to have permission to send a signal to a process
designated by pid, the real or effective user ID of
the receiving process must match that of the sending process or the user
must have appropriate privileges (such as given by a set-user-ID program or
the user is the super-user). A single exception is the signal
SIGCONT, which may always be sent to any descendant
of the current process.
- If pid is greater than zero:
- Sig is sent to the process whose ID is equal to pid.
- If pid is zero:
- Sig is sent to all processes whose group ID is equal to the process group ID of the sender, and for which the process has permission; this is a variant of killpg(3).
- If pid is -1:
- If the user has super-user privileges, the signal is sent to all processes
excluding system processes (with
P_SYSTEMflag set), process with ID 1 (usually init(8)), and the process sending the signal. If the user is not the super user, the signal is sent to all processes with the same uid as the user excluding the process sending the signal. No error is returned if any process could be signaled.
NOTE! If the sending process is restricted by a reaper, the signal is further restricted to processes only within or under that reaper. The reaper itself can only be signalled directly.
For compatibility with System V, if the process number is negative but not -1, the signal is sent to all processes whose process group ID is equal to the absolute value of the process number. This is a variant of killpg(3).
RETURN VALUES
The kill() function returns the
value 0 if successful; otherwise the value -1 is returned and
the global variable errno is set to indicate the
error.
ERRORS
Kill() will fail and no signal will be
sent if:
- [
EINVAL] - Sig is not a valid signal number.
- [
ESRCH] - No process can be found corresponding to that specified by pid.
- [
ESRCH] - The process id was given as 0 but the sending process does not have a process group.
- [
EPERM] - The sending process is not the super-user and its effective user id does not match the effective user-id of the receiving process. When signaling a process group, this error is returned if any members of the group could not be signaled.
SEE ALSO
getpgrp(2), getpid(2), lwp_kill(2), sigaction(2), killpg(3), raise(3), init(8)
STANDARDS
The kill() function call is expected to
conform to IEEE Std 1003.1-1990
(“POSIX.1”).
HISTORY
A kill() function call appeared in
Version 7 AT&T UNIX.