In what order should I send signals to gracefully shutdown processes?

SIGTERM tells an application to terminate. The other signals tell the application other things which are unrelated to shutdown but may sometimes have the same result. Don't use those. If you want an application to shut down, tell it to. Don't give it misleading signals.

Some people believe the smart standard way of terminating a process is by sending it a slew of signals, such as HUP, INT, TERM and finally KILL. This is ridiculous. The right signal for termination is SIGTERM and if SIGTERM doesn't terminate the process instantly, as you might prefer, it's because the application has chosen to handle the signal. Which means it has a very good reason to not terminate immediately: It's got cleanup work to do. If you interrupt that cleanup work with other signals, there's no telling what data from memory it hasn't yet saved to disk, what client applications are left hanging or whether you're interrupting it "mid-sentence" which is effectively data corruption.

For more information on what the real meaning of the signals is, see sigaction(2). Don't confuse "Default Action" with "Description", they are not the same thing.

SIGINT is used to signal an interactive "keyboard interrupt" of the process. Some programs may handle the situation in a special way for the purpose of terminal users.

SIGHUP is used to signal that the terminal has disappeared and is no longer looking at the process. That is all. Some processes choose to shut down in response, generally because their operation makes no sense without a terminal, some choose to do other things such as recheck configuration files.

SIGKILL is used to forcefully remove the process from the kernel. It is special in the sense that it's not actually a signal to the process but rather gets interpreted by the kernel directly.

Don't send SIGKILL. SIGKILL should certainly never be sent by scripts. If the application handles the SIGTERM, it can take it a second to cleanup, it can take a minute, it can take an hour. Depending on what the application has to get done before it's ready to end. Any logic that "assumes" an application's cleanup sequence has taken long enough and needs to be shortcut or SIGKILLed after X seconds is just plain wrong.

The only reason why an application would need a SIGKILL to terminate, is if something bugged out during its cleanup sequence. In which case you can open a terminal and SIGKILL it manually. Aside from that, the only one other reason why you'd SIGKILL something is because you WANT to prevent it from cleaning itself up.

Even though half the world blindly sends SIGKILL after 5 seconds it's still horribly wrong thing to do.

Short Answer: Send SIGTERM, 30 seconds later, SIGKILL. That is, send SIGTERM, wait a bit (it may vary from program to program, you may know your system better, but 5 to 30 seconds is enough. When shutting down a machine, you may see it automatically waiting up to 1'30s. Why the hurry, after all?), then send SIGKILL.

Reasonable Answer: SIGTERM, SIGINT, SIGKILLThis is more than enough. The process will very probably terminate before SIGKILL.

Long Answer: SIGTERM, SIGINT, SIGQUIT, SIGABRT, SIGKILL

This is unnecessary, but at least you are not misleading the process regarding your message. All these signals do mean you want the process to stop what it is doing and exit.

No matter what answer you choose from this explanation, keep that in mind!

If you send a signal that means something else, the process may handle it in very different ways (on one hand). On the other hand, if the process doesn't handle the signal, it doesn't matter what you send after all, the process will quit anyway (when the default action is to terminate, of course).

So, you must think as yourself as a programmer. Would you code a function handler for, lets say, SIGHUP to quit a program that connects with something, or would you loop it to try to connect again? That is the main question here! That is why it is important to just send signals that mean what you intend.

Almost Stupid Long Answer:

The table bellow contains the relevant signals, and the default actions in case the program does not handle them.

I ordered them in the order I suggest to use (BTW, I suggest you to use the reasonable answer, not this one here), if you really need to try them all (it would be fun to say the table is ordered in terms of the destruction they may cause, but that is not completely true).

The signals with an asterisk (*) are NOT recommended. The important thing about these is that you may never know what it is programmed to do. Specially SIGUSR! It may start the apocalipse (it is a free signal for a programmer do whatever he/she wants!). But, if not handled OR in the unlikely case it is handled to terminate, the program will terminate.

In the table, the signals with default options to terminate and generate a core dump are left in the end, just before SIGKILL.

Signal     Value     Action   Comment----------------------------------------------------------------------SIGTERM      15       Term    Termination signalSIGINT        2       Term    Famous CONTROL+C interrupt from keyboardSIGHUP        1       Term    Disconnected terminal or parent diedSIGPIPE      13       Term    Broken pipeSIGALRM(*)   14       Term    Timer signal from alarmSIGUSR2(*)   12       Term    User-defined signal 2SIGUSR1(*)   10       Term    User-defined signal 1SIGQUIT       3       Core    CONTRL+\ or quit from keyboardSIGABRT       6       Core    Abort signal from abort(3)SIGSEGV      11       Core    Invalid memory referenceSIGILL        4       Core    Illegal InstructionSIGFPE        8       Core    Floating point exceptionSIGKILL       9       Term    Kill signal

Then I would suggest for this almost stupid long answer: SIGTERM, SIGINT, SIGHUP, SIGPIPE, SIGQUIT, SIGABRT, SIGKILL

And finally, the

Definitely Stupid Long Long Answer:

Don't try this at home.

SIGTERM, SIGINT, SIGHUP, SIGPIPE, SIGALRM, SIGUSR2, SIGUSR1, SIGQUIT, SIGABRT, SIGSEGV, SIGILL, SIGFPE and if nothing worked, SIGKILL.

SIGUSR2 should be tried before SIGUSR1 because we are better off if the program doesn't handle the signal. And it is much more likely for it to handle SIGUSR1 if it handles just one of them.

BTW, the KILL: it is not wrong to send SIGKILL to a process, as other answer stated. Well, think what happens when you send a shutdown command? It will try SIGTERM and SIGKILL only. Why do you think that is the case? And why do you need any other signals, if the very shutdown command uses only these two?

Now, back to the long answer, this is a nice oneliner:

for SIG in 15 2 3 6 9 ; do echo $SIG ; echo kill -$SIG $PID || break ; sleep 30 ; done

It sleeps for 30 seconds between signals. Why else would you need a oneliner? ;)

Also, recommended: try it with only signals 15 2 9 from the reasonable answer.

safety: remove the second echo when you are ready to go. I call it my dry-run for onliners. Always use it to test.

Script killgracefully

Actually I was so intrigued by this question that I decided to create a small script to do just that. Please, feel free to download (clone) it here:

GitHub link to Killgracefully repository

Typically you'd send SIGTERM, the default of kill. It's the default for a reason. Only if a program does not shutdown in a reasonable amount of time should you resort to SIGKILL. But note that with SIGKILL the program has no possibility to clean things up und data could be corrupted.

As for SIGHUP, HUP stands for "hang up" and historically meant that the modem disconnected. It's essentially equivalent to SIGTERM. The reason that daemons sometimes use SIGHUP to restart or reload config is that daemons detach from any controlling terminals as a daemon doesn't need those and therefore would never receive SIGHUP, so that signal was considered as "freed up" for general use. Not all daemons use this for reload! The default action for SIGHUP is to terminate and many daemons behave that way! So you can't go blindly sending SIGHUPs to daemons and expecting them to survive.

Edit: SIGINT is probably inappropriate to terminate a process, as it's normally tied to ^C or whatever the terminal setting is to interrupt a program. Many programs capture this for their own purposes, so it's common enough for it not to work. SIGQUIT typically has the default of creating a core dump, and unless you want core files laying around it's not a good candidate, either.

Summary: if you send SIGTERM and the program doesn't die within your timeframe then send it SIGKILL.