Murder Most Fowl - page 3

Dealing with SIGHUP

SIGHUP is pronounced "sig-hup", and means "signal hangup". How do you send a SIGHUP? There are several ways:

# kill -HUP [pid]

# killall -HUP [process-name]

# kill -1 [pid]

# killall -1 [process-name]

So you may use PIDs or names, and signal names or numbers. Why do this instead of restarting it with /etc/init.d/foo restart? It is preferable to control services with their init files, as these usually include sanity and error checks, and additional functions. The main reason to be familiar with the kill command and signals is to stop hung or runaway processes as cleanly as possible, and not have to reboot or logout.