Nginx doesn't recognize command

I was following the tutorial here:
http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/2/2/centos-installing-nginx-from-source
and I tried to stop nginx by executing:
sudo nginx stop at the directory
and it says:
invalid option “stop”
why is it not recognizing the option??

Hello!

On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 12:26:47AM +0000, Aditya H. wrote:

I was following the tutorial here:
http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/2/2/centos-installing-nginx-from-source
and I tried to stop nginx by executing:
sudo nginx stop at the directory
and it says:
invalid option “stop”
why is it not recognizing the option??

Because there is no such option. If you see somebody running
“nginx stop” - he probably refer to his operating system startup
script instead, not nginx itself.

To stop nginx you have to sent SIGTERM to master process (or
SIGQUIT for graceful shutdown), i.e.

kill -s TERM cat /path/to/nginx.pid

should work. Alternatively in 0.7.53+ you may use

nginx -s stop

but this isn’t really recommended unless you are under Windows and
has no other options (as this implies config parsing and may not
work at all e.g. if you have errors in your config).

See here for more details:

Maxim D.