process.kill()

process.kill(pid[, signal])

Send a signal to a process. pid is the process id and signal is the string describing the signal to send. Signal names are strings like SIGINT or SIGHUP. If omitted, the signal will be SIGTERM. See Signal Events and kill(2) for more information.

Will throw an error if target does not exist, and as a special case, a signal of 0 can be used to test for the existence of a process. Windows platforms will throw an error if the pid is used to kill a process group.

Note that even though the name of this function is process.kill, it is really just a signal sender, like the kill system call. The signal sent may do something other than kill the target process.

Example of sending a signal to yourself:

process.on('SIGHUP', () => {
  console.log('Got SIGHUP signal.');
});

setTimeout(() => {
  console.log('Exiting.');
  process.exit(0);
}, 100);

process.kill(process.pid, 'SIGHUP');

Note: When SIGUSR1 is received by Node.js it starts the debugger, see Signal Events.