killpg shell command 4684

You're taking things to literally. Please think back to algebra, where we learned the concept of a letter being a subsbreastute for some (possibly unknown) number. The man page on MandrX LE2005 says

SYNOPSIS kill -s signal -p -a -- pid ... kill -l signal

Okay, this tells us that there is indeed no literal "-n" option. Then, it says

OPTIONS pid... Specify the list of processes that kill should signal. Each pid can be one of five things:

n where n is larger than 0. The process with pid n will be signaled.

0 All processes in the current process group are signaled.

-1 All processes with pid larger than 1 will be signaled.

-n where n is larger than 1. All processes in process group n are signaled. When an argument of the form `-n' is given, and it is meant to denote a process group, either the signal must be specified first, or the argument must be preceded by a `--' option, otherwise it will be taken as the signal to send.

Along with the context, the phrases "where n is larger than 0" and "where n is larger than 1" are a clue that the "n" is intended to represent a number. The idea is you find the process ID number for the process or process group you want to deal with. Then, you put that number (okay, a string version of the decimal representation of it) as a command line argument. If you want to kill a process group, you put a "-", alias hyphen, alias minus sign, alias unary minus operator, immediate before (no spaces between) the number.

Oh, and on the matter of including context: that is an established and generally agreed-upon matter of newsgroup etiquette. You have come into the newsgroup asking free help. None of us owes you anything, but we are willing to help out, subject to reasonable social behavior. You have been gently informed of the social rules (etiquette) that prevail in this newsgroup. If you are nasty and insistent about violating those rules, then there's nothing stopping any or all of us from ignoring your requests for help. We can refund everything you have paid us for our help so far (zero), and leave you to search elsewhere for the help you have requested. If you are really nasty about it, it's easy enough for any (or all) of us to plonk you, meaning we won't even see your next request.

So, play nice. :-)

Robert Riches (Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)