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I am trying to execute the following command in which I use the kill and exec commands.

kill -l -exec grep -i 'term' {} +

Since, kill -l returns a list of all kill signals, I want to find all those signals which contain the word 'term' using grep with case insensitive -i flag. But, it returns the following errors. Could someone advise why could this be?

-bash: kill: grep: invalid signal specification -bash: kill: -i: invalid signal specification 15 -bash: kill: {}: invalid signal specification -bash: kill: +: invalid signal specification
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  • What are these supposed to do? -exec looks what you'd use with find, what does kill have to do with it? Do you just want to pipe kill to grep? Commented Jun 24, 2022 at 12:27
  • @muru The way I understood was that -exec acts on the output of an another command ( the command being kill -l) which returns the output of kill signals. From there, I want to find all those kill signals which contain the terminate (term) keyword. Commented Jun 24, 2022 at 12:28
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    There is no generic -exec - find has a -exec which runs commands, but I don't know of other commands that have such an option. Do you just want to do kill -l | grep ...? Commented Jun 24, 2022 at 12:29
  • @muru yes, that's basically what I wanted to do but with the -exec command. So, -exec is available only with the find command? Commented Jun 24, 2022 at 12:30
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    Yes, because -exec is not a command. There is an exec command but you can't use either of them as options to random commands and expect them to work. Commented Jun 24, 2022 at 12:32

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-exec cmd {} + is an idiom of the find command and the find command alone. It's used there to run cmd with the files it has found as arguments. -exec there is not an option, it's generally called a predicate and is used in the chain of conditions and actions that make up a find expression (find also supports options which are passed before the list of files / directories it should start finding from).

kill is a command that is builtin in most shells and used to send signals to processes based on their process ID or the shell job they're member of.

Most implementations also support a -l option which lists the signals that may be sent in a format that varies with the implementation. Some list signals one per line, some in column, some just space separated, some include both the the signal name and number.

If, in addition to the -l option, you pass a signal name or number (with or without the SIG prefix with some implementation), some kill implementations will output the corresponding signal number / name, though some always print the name, and some only accept numbers.

So:

kill -l TERM

for instance, with some kill implementations including the kill builtin of the zsh shell will output:

15

Where 15 on most if not all systems is the actual value of SIGTERM.

In the zsh shell, the signal names (+ EXIT which is also used in trap) are also available in the $signals special array:

$ echo $signals EXIT HUP INT QUIT ILL TRAP ABRT BUS FPE KILL USR1 SEGV USR2 PIPE ALRM TERM STKFLT CHLD CONT STOP TSTP TTIN TTOU URG XCPU XFSZ VTALRM PROF WINCH POLL PWR SYS ZERR DEBUG

The signal number for a given signal is its index in the array minus 1.

$ echo $signals[15+1] TERM $ echo $(( signals[(I)TERM] - 1 )) 15

Or for a case insensitive matching:

$ set -o extendedglob $ echo $(( signals[(I)(#i)term] - 1 )) 15

(kill -l term also works in many kill implementations).

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With the -l option, the output of bash's kill builtin when not in POSIX mode is:

$ kill -l 1) SIGHUP 2) SIGINT 3) SIGQUIT 4) SIGILL 5) SIGTRAP 6) SIGABRT 7) SIGEMT 8) SIGFPE 9) SIGKILL 10) SIGBUS 11) SIGSEGV 12) SIGSYS 13) SIGPIPE 14) SIGALRM 15) SIGTERM 16) SIGURG 17) SIGSTOP 18) SIGTSTP 19) SIGCONT 20) SIGCHLD 21) SIGTTIN 22) SIGTTOU 23) SIGIO 24) SIGXCPU 25) SIGXFSZ 26) SIGVTALRM 27) SIGPROF 28) SIGWINCH 29) SIGINFO 30) SIGUSR1 31) SIGUSR2

I can group each pair number) signal with xargs -n 2

So this should do what you asked for:

kill -l | xargs -n 2 | grep -i term
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