I'm doing some virtual hosting on my site. As I make changes to the httpd.conf file, I want to stop and start httpd instead of rebooting the server.

The Linux books I have say to use kill -TERM 'cat /var/www...httpd.pid'

When I do that, I get a ">" cursor, so I'm not sure if the command worked or what to do next.

I've read about parent and child processes, but from what I can tell, kill -TERM is what I need to do.

Question:
1) What's the syntax to stop httpd and start it again?
2) How do I verify it stopped (and started)?
3) What's the ">" prompt asking for?

You should be able to do an 'apachectl restart' to restart the webserver. You could also use the init script if the distro you are using is Sys V.

"apachectl restart" didn't work. All I get is another > prompt. What does this mean?