Shell Differences – Why ‘kill -l’ Gives Different Output in Fish and Bash

bashfishkillshelltcsh

I was using fish-shell when reading about kill command.
The output of kill -l command for fish is

HUP INT QUIT ILL TRAP ABRT IOT BUS FPE KILL USR1 SEGV USR2 PIPE ALRM
....

When invoking same command in bash I had

 1) SIGHUP   2) SIGINT   3) SIGQUIT  4) SIGILL   5) SIGTRAP
 ....

I checked kill with whereis, and there is valid path to program /usr/bin/kill. I also checked man bash for kill, and didn't find anything connected to kill itself :(, so it's not bash builtin.
I also tried kill -l on tcsh and output was once more different.
This is not very important problem for me, but I really curious why does it look like this.
I'm using RHEL7 clone.

Best Answer

It can still be a shell built-in even when not documented:

~ (101) bash
tom@vmw-debian7-64:~$ kill -l
 1) SIGHUP       2) SIGINT       3) SIGQUIT      4) SIGILL       5) SIGTRAP
 6) SIGABRT      7) SIGBUS       8) SIGFPE       9) SIGKILL     10) SIGUSR1
11) SIGSEGV     12) SIGUSR2     13) SIGPIPE     14) SIGALRM     15) SIGTERM
16) SIGSTKFLT   17) SIGCHLD     18) SIGCONT     19) SIGSTOP     20) SIGTSTP
21) SIGTTIN     22) SIGTTOU     23) SIGURG      24) SIGXCPU     25) SIGXFSZ
26) SIGVTALRM   27) SIGPROF     28) SIGWINCH    29) SIGIO       30) SIGPWR
31) SIGSYS      34) SIGRTMIN    35) SIGRTMIN+1  36) SIGRTMIN+2  37) SIGRTMIN+3
38) SIGRTMIN+4  39) SIGRTMIN+5  40) SIGRTMIN+6  41) SIGRTMIN+7  42) SIGRTMIN+8
43) SIGRTMIN+9  44) SIGRTMIN+10 45) SIGRTMIN+11 46) SIGRTMIN+12 47) SIGRTMIN+13
48) SIGRTMIN+14 49) SIGRTMIN+15 50) SIGRTMAX-14 51) SIGRTMAX-13 52) SIGRTMAX-12
53) SIGRTMAX-11 54) SIGRTMAX-10 55) SIGRTMAX-9  56) SIGRTMAX-8  57) SIGRTMAX-7
58) SIGRTMAX-6  59) SIGRTMAX-5  60) SIGRTMAX-4  61) SIGRTMAX-3  62) SIGRTMAX-2
63) SIGRTMAX-1  64) SIGRTMAX
tom@vmw-debian7-64:~$ type kill
kill is a shell builtin
tom@vmw-debian7-64:~$

With fish:

tom@vmw-debian7-64:~$ fish
Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell
Type help for instructions on how to use fish
tom@vmw-debian7-64 ~> kill -l
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
tom@vmw-debian7-64 ~> type kill
kill is /bin/kill
tom@vmw-debian7-64 ~>

With zsh

tom@vmw-debian7-64:~$ zsh
vmw-debian7-64% kill -l
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
vmw-debian7-64% type kill
kill is a shell builtin

With tcsh

tom@vmw-debian7-64:~$ tcsh
~ (101) kill -l
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 
RTMIN RTMIN+1 RTMIN+2 RTMIN+3 RTMAX-3 RTMAX-2 RTMAX-1 RTMAX 
~ (102) type kill
type: Command not found.
~ (103) which kill
kill: shell built-in command.
~ (104) which which
which: shell built-in command.

It is a built-in for dash also, but the listing is a single column...

...
RTMAX-8
RTMAX-7
RTMAX-6
RTMAX-5
RTMAX-4
RTMAX-3
RTMAX-2
RTMAX-1
RTMAX
$ type kill
kill is a shell builtin
$ which kill
/bin/kill
$ /bin/kill -l
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

I would get similar results for other systems (the nice thing about portable code). As for whereis, the manual page says

    WHEREIS(1)                       User Commands                          WHEREIS(1)



    NAME
           whereis  -  locate the binary, source, and manual page files for a com‐
           mand

note the binary (it does not try to look for shell built-ins or aliases).

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