Canceling Processes
There are different reasons to stop a program: it may take too long to finish, your boss may be watching, you may have started the wrong process. There are also diffrent ways to stop processes.
Processes running in the foreground
To free your shell, type the interrupt sequence CTRL-C, which will end the running command.
 | Unlike some other systems, Unix uses CTRL-C to stop processes in stead of copying selected data to some sort of temporary notepad. Be careful when running sessions to different systems starting from the same graphical environment, e.g. when running a terminal client to connect to an MS windows system. |
Canceling one or more processes with kill
The kill command cancels a running process. Use some form of ps to find out the PID of the process you want to cancel and give it as an option to kill.
tille:~>ps | grep mozi 8943 pts/4 00:00:08 /usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin 8946 pts/4 00:00:00 /usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin 8947 pts/4 00:00:00 /usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin 8948 pts/4 00:00:00 /usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin 8949 pts/4 00:00:00 /usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin 8952 pts/4 00:00:00 grep mozi tille:~>kill 8943 tille:~>ps -ef | grep mozi tille 8954 6958 0 11:32 pts/4 00:00:00 grep mozi [1]+ Terminated mozilla tille:~> |
Sometimes, a process might not die when the kill command is issued. Try the -9 option to kill in that case.
kill -9 -1 will kill all your processes except your current shell session.
In some cases, a process can loose its parent in such a way that the system can't reach it anymore. In that case, kill won't help. The orphaned process becomes a zombie, occupying resources without being able to use them. On some systems, the only way to get rid of them is to reboot when they start influencing system capacity, on some other systems there's a regular self-cleaning to get rid of excessive entities.