If there is a program that is not responding, you can manually terminate the program by using the kill
command. This command will send a specific signal to the unresponsive application and instruct the application to terminate itself.
There are forty-six signals in total that you can use, but generally these two signals are used:
-
SIGTERM (15)
— prompts a program to stop running and gives it some time to save its state. If you do not specify the signal when entering the kill command, this will be used. -
SIGKILL (9)
— forcibly terminates process immediately. You lose the unsaved state.
Apart from knowing the signals, you also need to know the process identification number (PID
) of the program you want to terminate. If you do not know the PID
, run the ps ux
command.
Note: To search directly for a process, you can use grep:
ps ux | grep <process name>
After making sure you know which signal to use and the PID
of the program, enter the following syntax:
kill -<signal> <PID>