kill is a word we normally use to mean murder. ;)
In the UNIX world we often use it to destroy wayward processes.
We also use it to send signals like SIGINFO.
$ pkill -INFO dd
$ kill -l
1 HUP Hangup 17 STOP Suspended (signal)
2 INT Interrupt 18 TSTP Suspended
3 QUIT Quit 19 CONT Continued
4 ILL Illegal instruction 20 CHLD Child exited
5 TRAP Trace/BPT trap 21 TTIN Stopped (tty input)
6 ABRT Abort trap 22 TTOU Stopped (tty output)
7 EMT EMT trap 23 IO I/O possible
8 FPE Floating point exception 24 XCPU Cputime limit exceeded
9 KILL Killed 25 XFSZ Filesize limit exceeded
10 BUS Bus error 26 VTALRM Virtual timer expired
11 SEGV Segmentation fault 27 PROF Profiling timer expired
12 SYS Bad system call 28 WINCH Window size changes
13 PIPE Broken pipe 29 INFO Information request
14 ALRM Alarm clock 30 USR1 User defined signal 1
15 TERM Terminated 31 USR2 User defined signal 2
16 URG Urgent I/O condition 32 THR Thread AST
$
The signals are reported by the shell but they are not in the shell.
The signals are defined by kernel, libc and so on.
If you want to reboot your machine you can kill the init process or
the pid -1 or something.
I think this differs between UNIXes.
Also you can go to single user mode with kill.
I don't do those things.
Being able to stop a process or re read the config file with a
$ pkill -HUP inetd
is good enough.
I find that many processes do not like the pgrep pkill style.
They want this.
$ kill -9 23433
after doing a grep
$ ps ax|grep <foobar>
If you want a process to dump core for you again kill can do it.
In networking C code we normally ignore the SIGHUP signal.
signal(SIGHUP, SIG_IGN);
Signals are one of the IPC mechanisms but they only signal events as they
do not carry any payload.
We have to do that some other way.
-Girish
--
Gayatri Hitech
http://gayatri-hitech.com