Skip to main content
Unix & Linux

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

8
  • According with your latest paragraph so I must assume the pkill and killall commands handle or can use in peace the same set of signals shown by kill command - am I correct? Commented May 16, 2022 at 17:44
  • 1
    About assumptions, it goes in hand with experimentation - I think that is good for any learning path, of course in controlled environments - For example - Linux through VirtualBox. Commented May 16, 2022 at 17:59
  • 6
    @ManuelJordan Each signal has a name and a number. Under the hood, the system call that a kill command has to make only accepts numbers. All the kill commands have an option to specify the signal as a number, and this is almost certain to be passed through unaltered. They also all have the option to specify by name (and will translate names into numbers), and are likely to assign the same names to the same numbers (especially for the widely used ones defined by the POSIX specification), but it's plausible some commands will differ in their support for uncommon signals. Commented May 17, 2022 at 10:49
  • 1
    @ManuelJordan yes, and indeed if you run man 7 signal in Linux, you'll see that the list of signals supported, and their numbers, can vary between versions of Linux, and between Linux architectures. Names should be the most portable, but only the POSIX ones are likely to be widely supported. Commented May 17, 2022 at 13:32
  • 1
    @ManuelJordan - this comment chain is getting rather long, but in short, MacOS is derived from BSD, so its signals (and indeed its manual pages, and implementations of standardized binaries) differ from Linux to varying degrees of significance. Commented May 17, 2022 at 18:16