Is '-9' a flag to kill command?

Question

What does -9 do?

It does not show up in the syntax:

$ kill
kill: usage: kill [-s sigspec | -n signum | -sigspec] pid | jobspec ... or kill -l [sigspec]
$

Answer 1

-9 is the signal number (in this case SIGKILL), so kill -9 sends a SIGKILL to the process in question.

This signal causes the process to terminate immediately (unless it's waiting in a kernel function). The signal can neither be ignored nor can the receiving process perform any clean up action after receiving the signal (i.e. a signal handler for SIGKILL is not called). See also the Wikipedia article on SIGKILL.

From the man page of my kill command (Linux):

   The  default  signal  for  kill is TERM. Use -l or -L to list available
   signals.  Particularly useful signals include  HUP,  INT,  KILL,  STOP,
   CONT,  and  0.   Alternate  signals  may be specified in three ways: -9
   -SIGKILL -KILL.

EDIT: kill -l (the bash built-in command) lists the following signal names and numeric values on my system:

 1) SIGHUP       2) SIGINT       3) SIGQUIT      4) SIGILL       5) SIGTRAP
 6) SIGABRT      7) SIGBUS       8) SIGFPE       9) SIGKILL     10) SIGUSR1
11) SIGSEGV     12) SIGUSR2     13) SIGPIPE     14) SIGALRM     15) SIGTERM
16) SIGSTKFLT   17) SIGCHLD     18) SIGCONT     19) SIGSTOP     20) SIGTSTP
21) SIGTTIN     22) SIGTTOU     23) SIGURG      24) SIGXCPU     25) SIGXFSZ
26) SIGVTALRM   27) SIGPROF     28) SIGWINCH    29) SIGIO       30) SIGPWR
31) SIGSYS      34) SIGRTMIN    35) SIGRTMIN+1  36) SIGRTMIN+2  37) SIGRTMIN+3
38) SIGRTMIN+4  39) SIGRTMIN+5  40) SIGRTMIN+6  41) SIGRTMIN+7  42) SIGRTMIN+8
43) SIGRTMIN+9  44) SIGRTMIN+10 45) SIGRTMIN+11 46) SIGRTMIN+12 47) SIGRTMIN+13
48) SIGRTMIN+14 49) SIGRTMIN+15 50) SIGRTMAX-14 51) SIGRTMAX-13 52) SIGRTMAX-12
53) SIGRTMAX-11 54) SIGRTMAX-10 55) SIGRTMAX-9  56) SIGRTMAX-8  57) SIGRTMAX-7
58) SIGRTMAX-6  59) SIGRTMAX-5  60) SIGRTMAX-4  61) SIGRTMAX-3  62) SIGRTMAX-2
63) SIGRTMAX-1  64) SIGRTMAX

Answer 2

man signal

Will show you the mapping between signal numbers and signal names.