$ kill
Send a signal to a process
DOCUMENTEDProcessesUbuntu 24.04 LTS baseline
Use care. This command sends signals to processes. Verify the PID before sending a terminating signal, especially SIGKILL.
Synopsis
kill [options] <pid> [...]What it does
- `kill` sends signals to processes; it does not inherently mean 'force kill'.
- SIGTERM requests termination and allows a program to handle the signal; SIGKILL cannot be caught or ignored by the target process.
Examples
Ask a process to terminate
kill 1234Send SIGTERM explicitly
kill -TERM 1234Force termination with SIGKILL
kill -KILL 1234Important details
These examples are intentionally conservative. Command behavior can still depend on filesystem state, permissions, locale, shell, installed package version, and other system configuration.
For exact option semantics, the linked authoritative documentation is the source of truth.