Linux - Different methods to kill process, Killing a process using different methods

Different methods to kill process

There are different methods to kill a process.

To kill a process you must specify the process id, before killing a process.

 # kill -TERM pid

 # kill -SIGTERM pid

 # kill -15 pid

How to find the process id?

 # ps -ef | grep firefox

The above command will list the process id of firefox

Output

user 21169 21145  0 10:28 pts/4    00:00:00 /bin/sh /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.19/firefox
user 21186 21169  0 10:28 pts/4    00:00:02 /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.19/firefox
user 21851 21145  0 12:25 pts/4    00:00:00 grep firefox

After finding the process, kill the process by specifying the process id.

 # kill -9 21186

Linux Killall Command - To kill process by its name
Instead of specifying a process by its PID, you can specify the name of the process. If more than one process runs with that name, all of them will be killed.

Example: Kill all the firefox processes

 # killall -9 firefox

Pkill Command - Send signal to the process based on its name

You can send signal to any process by specifying the full name or partial name. So there is no need for you to find out the PID of the process to send the signal.

Example: Send SIGTERM to all the process which has sample in its name.

 # pkill sample

Pkill Example:

Before sending signal, you can verify which are all the process is matching the criteria using "pgrep -l", which displays the process ID and process name of the matching processes. In this example, all the processes are designed to log the signal to signal-log, along with its PID.

 # pgrep -l sample

   12406 sample-server.p
   12425 sample-server.p
   12430 sample-garbagec

 # pkill -USR1 sample

# cat signal-log

Name: ./sample-server.pl Pid: 12406 Signal Received: USR1
Name: ./sample-server.pl Pid: 12425 Signal Received: USR1
Name: ./sample-garbagecollector.pl Pid: 12430 Signal Received: USR1

Note: The part of name which you specify should be in the character within the first 15 character of the process name.

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