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by DrScump 2426 days ago
kill lets you send any signal to a process you have control over. Corresponding signal handlers allow a wide range of behavior changes.
1 comments

A lot of people only know about its use for literally killing a process. But as an example of where I find myself using it fairly often is:

kill -USR1 <dd>

where <dd> is the process ID (obtained from ps) for the dd command.

Instead of killing dd, it reports back how much has been read/copied so far. Especially useful for working with large files and you decide you want to guestimate how much longer the copy will take.