Difference between kill <pid> and kill -s TERM <pid>

Question

What exactly is the difference between kill <pid> and kill -s TERM <pid>. Initially i thought the $TERM variable holds a signal number but when I echo TERM its gives me

$echo $TERM
xterm-256color

Answer 1

There is no difference. From man kill:

The default signal for kill is TERM.

kill -s TERM <pid>

does not expand the variable TERM, as kill -s $TERM <pid> would. It uses the string TERM.

The correspondence between signal numbers and names are in man 7 signal. Also, from the POSIX specification of kill (my italics),

-s signal_name
Specify the signal to send, using one of the symbolic names defined in the <signal.h> header. Values of signal_name shall be recognized in a case-independent fashion, without the SIG prefix. In addition, the symbolic name 0 shall be recognized, representing the signal value zero. The corresponding signal shall be sent instead of SIGTERM.

Answer 2

The kill from GNU coreutils (version 8.32 that I have installed) has a --table or -L option that outputs this information:

 1 HUP    Hangup: 1
 2 INT    Interrupt: 2
 3 QUIT   Quit: 3
 4 ILL    Illegal instruction: 4
 5 TRAP   Trace/BPT trap: 5
 6 ABRT   Abort trap: 6
 7 EMT    EMT trap: 7
 8 FPE    Floating point exception: 8
 9 KILL   Killed: 9
10 BUS    Bus error: 10
11 SEGV   Segmentation fault: 11
12 SYS    Bad system call: 12
13 PIPE   Broken pipe: 13
14 ALRM   Alarm clock: 14
15 TERM   Terminated: 15
16 URG    Urgent I/O condition: 16
17 STOP   Suspended (signal): 17
18 TSTP   Suspended: 18
19 CONT   Continued: 19
20 CHLD   Child exited: 20
21 TTIN   Stopped (tty input): 21
22 TTOU   Stopped (tty output): 22
23 IO     I/O possible: 23
24 XCPU   Cputime limit exceeded: 24
25 XFSZ   Filesize limit exceeded: 25
26 VTALRM Virtual timer expired: 26
27 PROF   Profiling timer expired: 27
28 WINCH  Window size changes: 28
29 INFO   Information request: 29
30 USR1   User defined signal 1: 30
31 USR2   User defined signal 2: 31