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) |
