SIGTERM with a keyboard shortcut

consolekillprocesssignalterminal

I know that inside a terminal, Ctrl+C keyboard shortcut will send a SIGINT signal to the current foreground process. Is there a way to setup a keyboard shortcut for sending SIGTERM or even SIGKILL to the current process? I think it could save me some time.

I'm running Ubuntu 11.04

Best Answer

stty is responsible for controlling this, you may already have one setup. You can check by doing:

$ stty -e
speed 38400 baud; 53 rows; 225 columns;
lflags: icanon isig iexten echo echoe echok echoke -echonl echoctl
        -echoprt -altwerase -noflsh -tostop -flusho pendin -nokerninfo
        -extproc
iflags: -istrip icrnl -inlcr -igncr ixon -ixoff -ixany imaxbel -iutf8
        -ignbrk brkint -inpck ignpar -parmrk
oflags: opost onlcr -oxtabs -onocr -onlret
cflags: cread cs8 -parenb -parodd -hupcl -clocal -cstopb -crtscts
        -dsrflow -dtrflow -mdmbuf
discard dsusp   eof     eol     eol2    erase   intr    kill    lnext   
^O      ^Y      ^D      <undef> <undef> ^?      ^C      ^U      ^V      
min     quit    reprint start   status  stop    susp    time    werase  
1       ^\      ^R      ^Q      ^@      ^S      ^Z      0       ^W

The last few lines should look familiar, ^C=intr is the one you mentioned in your question. You can read how to set more via:

$ man stty

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If you are using a MAC keyboard Command+dot/period should be equivalent to Ctrl+C for break.

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Refer to the Terminal Help > Keyboard Shortcuts

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pkill -KILL -u {username} Does it just send SIGKILL to every child of init --user? and does it ensure that every child process is safely killed?

It sends SIGKILL to all processes owned by the {username} account, regardless of their parent. (Note that "init --user" is somewhat distro-specific.)

However, it's about as far from "safe" as you can go. SIGKILL is the brute force approach which ends all processes without letting them properly shut down and clean up; it's the opposite of "safe."

Many terminal-based programs react to SIGHUP as "line hangup". After a few seconds, the remaining ones can be stopped with SIGTERM. Only then, if you still have leftovers after both SIGHUP and SIGTERM, should you use SIGKILL as the final approach.

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Possibly – most programs do understand SIGHUP or SIGTERM. But graphical programs might prefer to be stopped by the session manager, i.e. by gnome-session, using ICE/XSMP (I don't know how this works exactly). In general, the "safest" approach would be to use the desktop environment's logoff command; for example:

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Best Answer

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