R – Programmatically getting the iPhone’s carrier signal strength

You don't say if the tree you want to kill is a single process group. (This is often the case if the tree is the result of forking from a server start or a shell command line.) You can discover process groups using GNU ps as follows:

 ps x -o  "%p %r %y %x %c "

If it is a process group you want to kill, just use the kill(1) command but instead of giving it a process number, give it the negation of the group number. For example to kill every process in group 5112, use kill -TERM -- -5112.

About the carrier: Running your code on the simulator gives me nil while running on a device correctly says 2011-11-24 10:49:05.182 testapp[12579:707] Carrier Name: Vodafone.de, so the code is absolutely correct (running on iOS 5.0.1 using Xcode 4.2). Maybe your carrier didn't fill out some field correctly? In any case I would consider testing on another device or with another SIM card.

Concerning signal strength: As CTGetSignalStrength seems to be a rather undocumented API the values may be arbitrarily defined by Apple (and redefined as well). In any case this seems to be a RSSI value (received signal strength indication) which is more or less a positive number where 1 is the worst signal strength and upper is better. As such there is no predefined (documented and thus stable) available mapping to dBm values, a mapping would probably have to be created experimentally.