NAME

kill − terminate a process

SYNOPSIS

int kill(pid)
int pid;

DESCRIPTION

Kill will stop process pid and remove it from the system, returning SYSERR if the process id is invalid, OK otherwise.  Kill terminates a process immediately.  If the process has been queued on a semaphore, it is removed from the queue and the semaphore count is incremented as if the process had never been there.  Processes waiting to send a message to a full port disappear without affecting the port.  If the process is waiting for I/O, the I/O is stopped (if possible). 

One can kill a process in any state, including a suspended one.  Once killed, a process cannot recover. 

BUGS

At present there is no way to recover space allocated dynamically when a process terminates.  However, kill does recover the stack space allocated to a process when it is created. 

December 01, 1986  —  Xinu Programmer’s Manual