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# kill

Perl 5 version 16.0 documentation
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# kill

Perl functions A-Z | Perl functions by category | The 'perlfunc' manpage

- kill SIGNAL, LIST
- kill SIGNAL

  Sends a signal to a list of processes. Returns the number of processes successfully signaled (which is not necessarily the same as the number actually killed).

          $cnt = kill 1, $child1, $child2;    kill 9, @goners;

  If SIGNAL is zero, no signal is sent to the process, but `kill` checks whether it's possible to send a signal to it (that means, to be brief, that the process is owned by the same user, or we are the super-user). This is useful to check that a child process is still alive (even if only as a zombie) and hasn't changed its UID. See perlport for notes on the portability of this construct.

  Unlike in the shell, if SIGNAL is negative, it kills process groups instead of processes. That means you usually want to use positive not negative signals. You may also use a signal name in quotes.

  The behavior of kill when a PROCESS number is zero or negative depends on the operating system. For example, on POSIX-conforming systems, zero will signal the current process group and -1 will signal all processes.

  See Signals in perlipc for more details.

  On some platforms such as Windows where the fork() system call is not available. Perl can be built to emulate fork() at the interpreter level. This emulation has limitations related to kill that have to be considered, for code running on Windows and in code intended to be portable.

  See perlfork for more details.

  If there is no LIST of processes, no signal is sent, and the return value is 0. This form is sometimes used, however, because it causes tainting checks to be run. But see Laundering and Detecting Tainted Data in perlsec.

  Portability issues: kill in perlport.