man tkill (2): send a signal to a thread

Other Alias

tgkill

SYNOPSIS

int tkill(int tid, int sig);

int tgkill(int tgid, int tid, int sig);

Note: There are no glibc wrappers for these system calls; see NOTES.

DESCRIPTION

tgkill() sends the signal sig to the thread with the thread ID tid in the thread group tgid. (By contrast, kill(2) can be used to send a signal only to a process (i.e., thread group) as a whole, and the signal will be delivered to an arbitrary thread within that process.)

tkill() is an obsolete predecessor to tgkill(). It allows only the target thread ID to be specified, which may result in the wrong thread being signaled if a thread terminates and its thread ID is recycled. Avoid using this system call.

These are the raw system call interfaces, meant for internal thread library use.

RETURN VALUE

On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.

ERRORS

EINVAL: An invalid thread ID, thread group ID, or signal was specified.
EPERM: Permission denied. For the required permissions, see kill(2).
ESRCH: No process with the specified thread ID (and thread group ID) exists.

VERSIONS

tkill() is supported since Linux 2.4.19 / 2.5.4. tgkill() was added in Linux 2.5.75.

CONFORMING TO

tkill() and tgkill() are Linux-specific and should not be used in programs that are intended to be portable.

NOTES

See the description of CLONE_THREAD in clone(2) for an explanation of thread groups.

Glibc does not provide wrappers for these system calls; call them using syscall(2).

COLOPHON

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