How to explicitly kill the process with PID 1 from inside a container?

For demonstration purposes, I would like to kill the process with PID 1 from inside a container. But apparently, kill 1 doesn't work:

$ sudo docker run -it centos
[root@3752d3a44f10 /]# ps
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
    1 pts/0    00:00:00 bash
   15 pts/0    00:00:00 ps
[root@3752d3a44f10 /]# kill 1
[root@3752d3a44f10 /]# kill -9 1
[root@3752d3a44f10 /]# kill -SEGV 1
[root@3752d3a44f10 /]# <-- shell is still running

Is there a way to explicitly kill the process with PID 1 from inside a container? How?

PID 1 is a special PID which will ignore certain signals unless handlers are explicitly created. Docker has some documentation on this:


Note: A process running as PID 1 inside a container is treated specially by Linux: it ignores any signal with the default action. So, the process will not terminate on SIGINT or SIGTERM unless it is coded to do so.

From here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/run/#foreground

To kill PID 1 you will have to explicitly declare the handler for the SIGTERM signal or, in current versions of Docker, pass the --init flag in the docker run command to instrument tini.

StackExchange DevOps Q#5613, answer score: 15