Sending a Signal to a Process

The mpkill command is comparable to the Solaris kill command. You use it to terminate all processes of the jobs with the specified job IDs running on the Sun HPC cluster, or to send a signal to it.

You can send any standard Solaris signal. Use the -l option to obtain a list of the supported signals, or the -d option to list them along with brief descriptions.

Specify the signal's name or number, followed by the job ID, to send that signal to the job. For example,

% mpkill -CONT 59

sends a SIGCONT to the processes that constitute job 59.

Issuing mpkill without specifying a signal sends a SIGTERM to the job.

To find out a job's job ID, use the command mpps or the -J option to mprun.

mpkill returns the following status values:

• 0 - The command executed successfully.

• 1 - An error was encountered during execution. For example, the job was not known.

• 2 - The command was partially successful. This typically occurs when you send a signal to a job in which one or more of the processes has already exited and therefore could not receive the signal.

Note, this is usually not an error, since the reason you are using mpkill is most likely to eliminate a job that has hung in this intermediate state.