I prefer matricide: sudo kill -9 1
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Uh, I'm not a cool terminal god, I just know how to use vim, so xkill is my way.
I use the terminal on a daily basis. My job involves writing software for terminals.
Ctrl+Meta+Esc in KDE is still how I kill a misbehaving graphical app.
htop is how I usually send signals. TUIs are fun!
Just open htop, find the process you wish to kill. Press F9,9,enter.
Done task killed
ps -e | grep app
kill id
at least on GNOME you can just open the system monitor and use it like task manager
sudo init 0
pkill
Or what I prefer:
pkill -f <process/programm name>
KWin has this shortcut (Ctrl + Win + Esc) that turns your cursor into a skull that kills the windows you click on
For me its Ctrl+Alt+Esc that does it, Ctrl+Meta+Esc just highlights where my mouse cursor is.
Could be a distro related difference ^^
Does it work on Wayland?
Yes, in Wayland it's built into kwin.
It does work for me at least
xkill (assuming GUI and not headless/remote)
xkill lets you click on any X application, at which point it will close the X server connection. In most cases the client application will self-terminate at the loss of the X connection. It's wonderfully straightforward.
True, xkill is super easy to use. Who needs a task manager, if you can just click on the program you want to close.
I usually just scream into my keyboard
Super easy
Sudo rm -rf /*
Pedant time: That actually wouldn’t kill any process that’s already loaded in memory and running. Unless the process attempts to access something else from the filesystem and crashes.
I thought that removes the French language pack?
No, that's rm -fr /*
yeah it probably does
Oui
pkill
pkill
btop
Uninterruptible sleep makes this harder than it looks
Kid named process:
I remember that kid! She was friends with that boy named Sue, right? Both of them always hanging out with little Bobby tables?
It's easy. Just open up a terminal and type
kill $PID
(Replace the $PID with the process id of the process) if you don't know the process id you can do
killall process_name
If these don't work you can add a -9 to banish them and give them no chance to resist
You probably want to get on the habit of using pkill instead of killall in case you're ever on a different system. You could have a surprise.
Also please refresh my memory on how to find the process ID
top for Ubuntu at least will show you the top processes, I think sorted by averaged CPU usage.
Pidof
htop or any process monitor will tell you.
You can do
ps aux | grep -i <part of process name>
and the PID is in the second column of the output. However for this use case I recommend a process manager like htop or btop
I use ps -aux | grep $EXECUTABLE
Similarly, $$ is the current PID, $PPID is the parent PID. (Bash)
So 'kill -9 $$' is just suicide?
With suicide, you have a chance to get your affairs in order. kill -9 $$ is hiring an assassin to kill you and not tell you when it will happen. It happens suddenly without warning.
You can type seppuku for that