Kill Process

**cosmo1983** · July 29th, 2006

Hi,

How would I kill a process from with bash? Do I always need to end the process using PID? I have tried "Killall Firefox" and it doesn't seem to work, is there way to read the current processes from within bash?

**Swab** · July 29th, 2006

killall firefox-bin

**Swab** · July 29th, 2006

"ps -e" will show you running processes.

**cosmo1983** · July 29th, 2006

Awesome, thanks.

**gruepig** · July 29th, 2006

Also try pkill, which is a bit cleaner than parsing the output of ps yourself.

**manqueller** · April 3rd, 2009

Isn't there a command that you can type in the terminal that will turn the cursor into a skull and cross bones, and then you can kill any application by clicking on it with that?

I forget what that one is.

**johnl** · April 3rd, 2009

The command you're thinking of is 'xkill'.

Generally I do something like this:

Code:

kill -TERM `pidof firefox`

**spupy** · April 4th, 2009

Some additional info regarding the topic. The purpose of the kill command is to send signals to a process. The default signal sent is 15 - SIGTERM - termination signal. 9 (SIGKILL) is a more hard and sure way to kill a process - a process can ignore sigterm, but sigkill is the "finger of death". There are several more signals: http://linux.die.net/man/7/signal

Two signals I find interesting are SIGSTOP and SIGCONT. With sigstop you can "freeze" a process. Use sigcont to unfreeze it. Beware that this can lead to problems, for example with files used by the frozen process.