kill a process in bash

Question

How do I kill a process which is running in bash - for example, suppose I open a file:

$ gedit file.txt

is there any way within the command prompt to close it? This example is fairly trivial, since I could just close the window, but it seems to come up a bit, particularly when I mistype commands.

Also is there any way to escape an executable which is running? This probably has the same solution, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

Thanks

Answer 1

You have a multiple options:

First, you can use kill. But you need the pid of your process, which you can get by using ps, pidof or pgrep.

ps -A  // to get the pid, can be combined with grep
-or-
pidof <name>
-or-
pgrep <name>

kill <pid>

It is possible to kill a process by just knowing the name. Use pkill or killall.

pkill <name>
-or-
killall <name>

All commands send a signal to the process. If the process hung up, it might be neccessary to send a sigkill to the process (this is signal number 9, so the following examples do the same):

pkill -9 <name>
pkill -SIGKILL <name>

You can use this option with kill and killall, too.

Read this article about controlling processes to get more informations about processes in general.

Answer 2

You can use the command pkill to kill processes. If you want to "play around", you can use "pgrep", which works exactly the same but returns the process rather than killing it.

pkill has the -f parameter that allows you to match against the entire command. So for your example, you can: pkill -f "gedit file.txt"

Answer 3

try kill -9 {processID}

To find the process ID you can use ps -ef | grep gedit

Answer 4

It is not clear to me what you mean by "escape an executable which is running", but ctrl-z will put a process into the background and return control to the command line. You can then use the fg command to bring the program back into the foreground.

Answer 5

You can press ctrl z. The process is sent to background and you get back to the shell prompt. Use the fg command to do the opposite.