UNIX Shell Kill Command

Question

My script to kill the process contains just this

#!/bin/sh

kill -SIGKILL 3590

I get ./xx.sh: line 3: kill: SIGKILL: invalid signal specification

But the same command working fine in the shell and kill -9 3590 working fine in the script as well.

'They' decided that forcing users to write SIG was a bad idea (probably correct) and didn't consider making the SIG optional (perhaps a less good idea). Also, kill in Bash is a built-in; see Bash POSIX mode; one of the bullets identifies the SIG prefix as being supported by bash and not by sh. The external command probably doesn't support the SIG prefix. — Jonathan Leffler
– Jonathan Leffler, Commented Dec 15, 2014 at 3:24

Chris Martin · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-15 03:16:11Z

2

If the script is behaving differently from the same command in a terminal, it's probably because they're using two different shells.

Just a guess, here, but I'm going to assume that shell in your terminal is bash and /bin/sh points to something else. Try changing the shebang line to #!/bin/bash.

answered Dec 15, 2014 at 3:16

Chris Martin

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1 Comment

chepner Over a year ago

To go with this, bash makes kill a shell builtin (to allow you to kill a process even if the process table is too full to create a process for running /bin/kill), but kill is not required to be a builtin according to the POSIX spec. (Oops, this pretty much just repeats what Jonathan Leffler said in a question comment.)

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