kill
If you want to kill a program in a graphical environment, open a terminal and type:
Graphical Programs
xkill
Then click on the application which you want to kill.
All Programs
To kill a program, find it with:
pgrep discord
This will give you the UUID, e.g. 19643
.
Kill the program with:
kill 19643
Types of Kill
To see an ordered list of termination signals:
kill -l
- SIGHUP 2) SIGINT 3) SIGQUIT 4) SIGILL 5) SIGTRAP
- SIGABRT 7) SIGBUS 8) SIGFPE 9) SIGKILL 10) SIGUSR1
- SIGSEGV 12) SIGUSR2 13) SIGPIPE 14) SIGALRM 15) SIGTERM
You can select these levels with a ‘- number’. Higher numbers are roughly equivalent to insistence.
For example:
kill -1 3498
This roughly means ‘maybe stop the program, if you can, maybe reload’.
Or the famous:
kill -9 3298
This means ‘kill the program dead, now, no questions, dead’.
Beware - if Firefox starts another program to connect to the internet, and you kill -9 firefox
, this will leave all of Firefox’s internet connection programs (“children”) still there, but dead and useless.
Sobriquets
- A dead program which sits there doing nothing is known as a ‘zombie’.
- A program which is run by another program is called a ‘child program’.
- A child whose parent program is dead is called an ‘orphan’.
- A child who remains running despite being useless because the parent is dead is called an ‘orphan zombie’.