I have recently started using htop, and I have been needing to kill processes, but when pressing F9 on the process, it has been giving me this list of options, I just chose the one which is selected by defaults, but I don't know what that actually does, although it seems to work:
So really my question is, what are these different options, and which is best to use to kill a process?
First try
SIGTERM 15 Term Termination signal
if this doesn't work
SIGKILL 9 Term Kill signal
From man 7 signal
First the signals described in the original POSIX.1-1990 standard.
Signal Value Action Comment
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
SIGHUP 1 Term Hangup detected on controlling terminal
or death of controlling process
SIGINT 2 Term Interrupt from keyboard
SIGQUIT 3 Core Quit from keyboard
SIGILL 4 Core Illegal Instruction
SIGABRT 6 Core Abort signal from abort(3)
SIGFPE 8 Core Floating point exception
SIGKILL 9 Term Kill signal
SIGSEGV 11 Core Invalid memory reference
SIGPIPE 13 Term Broken pipe: write to pipe with no
readers
SIGALRM 14 Term Timer signal from alarm(2)
SIGTERM 15 Term Termination signal
SIGUSR1 30,10,16 Term User-defined signal 1
SIGUSR2 31,12,17 Term User-defined signal 2
SIGCHLD 20,17,18 Ign Child stopped or terminated
SIGCONT 19,18,25 Cont Continue if stopped
SIGSTOP 17,19,23 Stop Stop process
SIGTSTP 18,20,24 Stop Stop typed at terminal
SIGTTIN 21,21,26 Stop Terminal input for background process
SIGTTOU 22,22,27 Stop Terminal output for background process
The signals SIGKILL and SIGSTOP cannot be caught, blocked, or
ignored.
Next the signals not in the POSIX.1-1990 standard but described in
SUSv2 and POSIX.1-2001.
Signal Value Action Comment
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
SIGBUS 10,7,10 Core Bus error (bad memory access)
SIGPOLL Term Pollable event (Sys V).
Synonym for SIGIO
SIGPROF 27,27,29 Term Profiling timer expired
SIGSYS 12,31,12 Core Bad argument to routine (SVr4)
SIGTRAP 5 Core Trace/breakpoint trap
SIGURG 16,23,21 Ign Urgent condition on socket (4.2BSD)
SIGVTALRM 26,26,28 Term Virtual alarm clock (4.2BSD)
SIGXCPU 24,24,30 Core CPU time limit exceeded (4.2BSD)
SIGXFSZ 25,25,31 Core File size limit exceeded (4.2BSD)
SIGINT, which is similar to pressing Ctrl+C and still lets the program finish orderly. I use it when terminating optimization runs using Gurobi: It immediately stops the program but the best found solution is still written to file.
Jan 24, 2017 at 8:29
Those are Process signals in general and not just related to htop, you can list all signals using the command
kill -l
For examplesource :
-1 or -HUP - This argument makes kill send the "Hang Up" signal to processes. This probably originates from the modem/dial-in era. Processes have to be programmed to actually listen to this process and do something with it. Most daemons are programmed to re-read their configuration when they receive such a signal. Anyway; this is very likely the safest kill signal there is, it should not obstruct anything.
-2 or -SIGINT - This is the same as starting some program and pressing CTRL+C during execution. Most programs will stop, you could lose data.
-9 or -KILL - The kernel will let go of the process without informing the process of it. An unclean kill like this could result in data loss. This is the "hardest", "roughest" and most unsafe kill signal available, and should only be used to stop something that seems unstoppable.
-15 or -TERM - Tell the process to stop whatever it's doing, and end itself. When you don't specify any signal, this signal is used. It should be fairly safe to perform, but better start with a "-1" or "-HUP".
The list from signal.h file:
+--------------------+------------------+
* | POSIX signal | default action |
* +--------------------+------------------+
* | SIGHUP | terminate |
* | SIGINT | terminate |
* | SIGQUIT | coredump |
* | SIGILL | coredump |
* | SIGTRAP | coredump |
* | SIGABRT/SIGIOT | coredump |
* | SIGBUS | coredump |
* | SIGFPE | coredump |
* | SIGKILL | terminate(+) |
* | SIGUSR1 | terminate |
* | SIGSEGV | coredump |
* | SIGUSR2 | terminate |
* | SIGPIPE | terminate |
* | SIGALRM | terminate |
* | SIGTERM | terminate |
* | SIGCHLD | ignore |
* | SIGCONT | ignore(*) |
* | SIGSTOP | stop(*)(+) |
* | SIGTSTP | stop(*) |
* | SIGTTIN | stop(*) |
* | SIGTTOU | stop(*) |
* | SIGURG | ignore |
* | SIGXCPU | coredump |
* | SIGXFSZ | coredump |
* | SIGVTALRM | terminate |
* | SIGPROF | terminate |
* | SIGPOLL/SIGIO | terminate |
* | SIGSYS/SIGUNUSED | coredump |
* | SIGSTKFLT | terminate |
* | SIGWINCH | ignore |
* | SIGPWR | terminate |
* | SIGRTMIN-SIGRTMAX | terminate |
* +--------------------+------------------+
* | non-POSIX signal | default action |
* +--------------------+------------------+
* | SIGEMT | coredump |
* +--------------------+------------------+
further read:
man signal , man 2 signal , man 7 signal , man kill