When a course of misbehaves, you may generally need to terminate or kill it. In this put up, we’ll discover a number of methods to terminate a course of or an utility from the command line in addition to from a graphical interface, utilizing gedit as a pattern utility.
Using the command line/termination characters
Ctrl + C
One drawback invoking gedit from the command line (in case you are not utilizing gedit &) is that it’s going to not liberate the immediate, in order that shell session is blocked. In such instances, Ctrl+C (the Control key together with ‘C’) turns out to be useful. That will terminate gedit and all work will likely be misplaced (until the file was saved). Ctrl+C sends the SIGINT sign to gedit. This is a cease sign whose default motion is to terminate the method. It instructs the shell to cease gedit and return to the principle loop, and you will get the immediate again.
Ctrl + Z
This is named a droop character. It sends a SIGTSTP sign to course of. This can also be a cease sign, however the default motion is to not kill however to droop the method.
It will cease (kill/terminate) gedit and return the shell immediate.
$ gedit
^Z
[1]+ Stopped gedit
$
Once the method is suspended (on this case, gedit), it’s not attainable to put in writing or do something in gedit. In the background, the method turns into a job. This may be verified by the jobs command.
$ jobs
[1]+ Stopped gedit
jobs lets you management a number of processes inside a single shell session. You can cease, resume, and transfer jobs to the background or foreground as wanted.
Let’s resume gedit within the background and liberate a immediate to run different instructions. You can do that utilizing the bg command, adopted by job ID (discover [1] from the output of jobs above. [1] is the job ID).
$ bg 1
[1]+ gedit &
This is just like beginning gedit with &,:
$ gedit &
Using kill
kill permits high-quality management over indicators, enabling you to sign a course of by specifying both a sign title or a sign quantity, adopted by a course of ID, or PID.
What I like about kill is that it may possibly additionally work with job IDs. Let’s begin gedit within the background utilizing gedit &. Assuming I’ve a job ID of gedit from the jobs command, let’s ship SIGINT to gedit:
$ kill -s SIGINT %1
Note that the job ID ought to be prefixed with %, or kill will contemplate it a PID.
kill can work with out specifying a sign explicitly. In that case, the default motion is to ship SIGTERM, which is able to terminate the method. Execute kill -l to checklist all sign names, and use the man kill command to learn the person web page.
Using killall
If you do not need to specify a job ID or PID, killall helps you to specify a course of by title. The easiest approach to terminate gedit utilizing killall is:
$ killall gedit
This will kill all of the processes with the title gedit. Like kill, the default sign is SIGTERM. It has the choice to disregard case utilizing -I:
$ gedit &
[1] 14852$ killall -I GEDIT
[1]+ Terminated gedit
To study extra about varied flags offered by killall (corresponding to -u, which lets you kill user-owned processes) verify the person web page (man killall)
Using xkill
Have you ever encountered a difficulty the place a media participant, corresponding to VLC, grayed out or hung? Now you will discover the PID and kill the appliance utilizing one of many instructions listed above or use xkill.
xkill lets you kill a window utilizing a mouse. Simply execute xkill in a terminal, which ought to change the mouse cursor to an x or a tiny cranium icon. Click x on the window you need to shut. Be cautious utilizing xkill, although—as its man web page explains, it may be harmful. You have been warned!
Refer to the person web page of every command for extra info. You may discover instructions like pkill and pgrep.