Using kill to terminate a misbehaving process in Linux

In order to work with your computer, you run programs. A running program is also known as a process. Normally, Linux has a lot of processes at any given time. What do you do if one of your running programs aka process stop responding ?

Fortunately, Linux has just the right tool for this scenario. The tool you would use is the kill command.

The syntax for kill is as follows :

$ kill -s signal PID

Where signal is the number or name that kill recognizes and which tells it to do a particular task. You can obtain a list of all the signals using the kill command as follows :

$ kill -l

And PID is the process id of the misbehaving application or program. The process id is a number.

So if I want to terminate Firefox web browser because it stops responding, I fire up a terminal and first check the process id of Firefox using the ps command. Then I execute the following kill command.

$ kill -s SIGKILL  pid-number-of-firefox

Note: You can also use the corresponding number instead of SIGKILL as follows :

$ kill -s 9 pid-number-of-firefox

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• A list of Linux signals
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