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kill

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  1. kill

kill

kill sends a signal to a process, most commonly SIGTERM (the default) to ask it to terminate gracefully, or SIGKILL (kill -9) to force it to stop immediately. You target a process by its PID. Scripts use kill to stop background jobs they started, such as a server process spun up for testing.

Warning: kill -9 (SIGKILL) cannot be caught or ignored by the process, so it never gets a chance to clean up before exiting.

Example: kill

bash 
#!/bin/bash
sleep 30 &
pid=$!
echo "Started process $pid"

kill "$pid"
echo "Sent termination signal to $pid"
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