Send a signal to a job

LSF uses signals to control jobs to enforce scheduling policies, or in response to user requests. The principal signals LSF uses are SIGSTOP to suspend a job, SIGCONT to resume a job, and SIGKILL to terminate a job.

Occasionally, you may want to override the default actions. For example, instead of suspending a job, you might want to kill or checkpoint it. You can override the default job control actions by defining the JOB_CONTROLS parameter in your queue configuration. Each queue can have its separate job control actions.

You can also send a signal directly to a job. You cannot send arbitrary signals to a pending job; most signals are only valid for running jobs. However, LSF does allow you to kill, suspend, and resume pending jobs.

You must be the owner of a job or an LSF administrator to send signals to a job.

You use the bkill -s command to send a signal to a job. If you issue bkill without the -s option, a SIGKILL signal is sent to the specified jobs to kill them. Twenty seconds before SIGKILL is sent, SIGTERM and SIGINT are sent to give the job a chance to catch the signals and clean up.

On Windows, job control messages replace the SIGINT and SIGTERM signals, but only customized applications are able to process them. Termination is implemented by the TerminateProcess() system call.