Closing Hanging Programs

thebear · 06-01-2003, 09:26 AM

Newb question...I have RH9 and I have no idea how to close a program when it starts to hang. The Windows equivelent of what I mean is CTRL+ALT+DLT - being able to close a frozen program. Any help on this would be cool

Proud · 06-01-2003, 09:31 AM

Graphically you can select xkill from your menu, then click on the app's window (but not taskbar entry)
From the command line, use either ps or top to get the process id, and then kill it. Use the man files for more info on each command.

fancypiper · 06-01-2003, 10:19 AM

Essentially, in command line, find the process, then kill the process number

# What processes are running
ps -A
# Find a process by name
ps -ef | grep -i <plain text>
For example, XCDroast
ps -ef | grep -i xcdroast

That returns a number, then

kill -9 <pid> should get it.

For a gui window, run xkill

twilli227 · 06-01-2003, 11:05 AM

fancypiper, when I run ps -A it shows the pid. Can't you just kill<pid>?
Thanks for the grep, I will be using that.

acid_kewpie · 06-01-2003, 11:09 AM

yes you can, the -9 jsut send the KILL signal rather than the default HUP signal (i think that's defaualt.. can't remember)

you could also use "killall <name>" not as powerful, but much quicker.

Proud · 06-01-2003, 11:41 AM

kill -l lists the signal types btw. Seems like kill -s signal name or number seems the correct syntax