Murder Murder Murder

You say kill just doesn’t do it for you. Have you tried killall? Oh well in that case I would suggest pkill.

Really pkill is very similar to kill and killall.  If you entered pkill firefox, it would find all processes related to firefox and do away with them right away.  The advantage of doing this over using the ps ux trick mentioned in this post, is that you don’t have to do the searching yourself.  And run the risk of missing a process.  As for an advantage over killall, pkill can be used with regular expressions.  Also, with killall you need to get the name exactly right.  Thus to kill the mozilla browser you would have to run killall mozilla-bin and not killall mozilla.

I personally have not found a need to use pkill as of yet, but you never know when it will come in handy.

More to Kill

Well not too much new has gone on.  I’ve recently started playing around with the Bluetooth capabilities, but don’t have anything useful to say thus far.

But don’t worry I have something that might be interesting.  Though not entirely new it will combine some commands that have been previously mentioned, and make life easier.

Remember back when I first talked about kill, I said that you only had to type ps ux | less then kill <process number>. Well the only “problem” with this approach is that you have to search through the list of process to find the one that you want.  So here is a cool little trick that might help, if you know part of the process name, that uses grep.

ps ux | grep "audacity"

This will only output all the process whos “name” contains audacity.  This is pretty useful, especially if you are lazy and not in the mood to read through the rest of the rubbish.  You will still have to use kill but all the real work has been removed.

Kill ‘em All

So you’re messing around and all of a sudden a program or 2 or even more stop responding. What do you do?  Well for starters you DON’T restart your system, well not initially anyway.

If a program (process) starts to act up and gets out of line, you are perfectly within your rights to go psyco and kill it. To use this command there are a few things you need to know, well really just one thing (other than some options you can use), and that’s the process number! This isn’t too hard to find just enter ps ux | less, the less is there so that you can scroll just in case the output is more than one page long.  This will list all of the processes that you (the user) are currently running. However you can also enter ps aux | less, to list ALL process that are running. Reading the table isn’t difficult so once you find what you are looking for just remember the number.

Now the fun begins. Suppose that the process number happens to be 7331.  Then the first thing to try is kill 7331.  If this doesn’t work then enter kill -9 7331.  The -9 will force the process to be killed without interruption (which might have caused kill 7331 not to work).  A command similar to kill is killall, which works with process names rather than process numbers.  So if 7331 were say firefox you would enter killall firefox. I should note that killall will end ALL instances of the program (firefox in this case) and not just the one that is misbehaving (7331).  More info on killall can be found here.

Here is a little video to help you remember all of this.