PMSIGNAL(1)

💖 PMSIGNAL(1) — the manual, bestie edition 💖

okay so this is a page from the General Commands Manual section of the PCP (Performance Co-Pilot) docs, and we're talking about pmsignal today. Sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, it's lowkey the most useful little thing.

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✨ NAME ✨

pmsignal — send a signal to one or more processes 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

$PCP_BINADM_DIR/pmsignal [-alnp] [-s signal] [PID ...|name ...]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So pmsignal is a cross-platform event signalling mechanism made to be used with the tools from the Performance Co-Pilot toolkit, periodt. What it does is send a named signal to one or more processes — but heads up, only HUP, USR1, TERM, and KILL are accepted. That's the whole guest list, no plus-ones 🙈.

You say which processes by giving PIDs directly, or by giving program names (that's where -a or -p come in, bestie).

• In the all case, the set of all running processes gets searched for a basename(1) match on name. Like, every process, we're going through them 👑.
• In the program case, the process identifiers get extracted from files in the $PCP_RUN_DIR directory, where the file names are matched on name.pid.

The -n option is the icon of "what if" — it reports the list of process identifiers that would have been signalled, but no signals are actually sent. Dry run energy, we love her. 🧚

If you don't specify a signal at all, then the TERM signal gets sent. And the list of supported signals is reported when you use the -l option. Easy.

⚠️ On Linux and UNIX platforms, pmsignal is literally just a simple wrapper around the kill(1) command. On Windows, though? There's no direct equivalent to this mechanism, so an alternate mechanism has been implemented — and here's the catch, it's only honoured by PCP tools, not by all Windows utilities. So yeah, iykyk. 💀

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

The available command line options are:

• -a, --all — send the signal to all named processes 💫
• -l, --list — list the supported signals 📜
• -n, --dry-run — list the processes that would be affected (no actual signalling, just vibes) 👀
• -p, --program — extract programs from PCP runtime PID files 🗂️
• -s signal, --signal=signal — specify the signal to send, one of: HUP, USR1, TERM, KILL 🚨
• -?, --help — display the usage message and exit 🫶

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🌈 PCP ENVIRONMENT 🌈

Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the file and directory names that PCP uses. On each installation, the file /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for these variables. And the $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an alternative configuration file, as described in pcp.conf(5). Customisation, slay. ⭐

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

basename(1), kill(1), killall(1), pcp.conf(5) and pcp.env(5).

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and that's the whole page, bestie, no cap 💜

This one comes to you from Performance Co-Pilot — that's the PCP source, in the PMSIGNAL(1) manual — so go forth, signal responsibly, and remember: TERM is the default, so if you didn't ask for chaos, don't act surprised when you get it 😭 🎀 ✨