How do i stop a locked program?
 

I've started using apt and synaptic for my downloads. Apparently I had 2 versions of guile in, it warned me I told it to remove the older version. That was about 30 minutes ago, synaptic is still running but shows no signs of life. Hourglass is turning, but otherwise it is un-responsive.

1) How do I know if it a program is actually doing something?

2) how do I stop a frozen program from running?

You can see all running programs by the command:

$ ps aux

use a pipeline to make it easier to read or grep particular program that you want to see like this:

$ ps aux | less
$ ps aux | grep something

it will show you the Process ID of a running program. If you want to stop it(coz it freezed?) just kill the process ID like this:

$ kill <a Process ID>

Hope this help :)