Safely kill precess
 

I have simple question.

I am reading some documents with various programs e.g. more, less, cat...

When type ps it appear that they stay in the memory.

Is it safely to kill them or even kill -9, when they continue to stay in memory?

It is okay to kill anything that doesn't make changes to files, such as the programs you mentioned. However, they should be exiting by themselves...

What's the 'kindest' way of using kill? I'd like to be able to stop and restart apps remotely. As they'd be apps that are running OK in the first place, a way of letting them exit gracefully would be good.

How do you kill the process. I use htop to kill a process. Then there is the long way of using ps -e and then looking at the id and then killing the process.
However a process once killed should stop running after a few seconds.

I type ps and then kill with the PID number as argument.

How must I exit from less, cat and other tools for viewing. I use ctrl+z. Is that ok?

Hi,

There's your problem, right there! CTRL-Z sends the process to the background, it doesn't terminate it. To stop processes like more, less, and so on, just type q to 'quit'. That's all.

Kind regards,

Eric

Also for the usage of kill. I found this nice little link that gives an nice of example of how to kill and when to use more extreme kill methods.

http://speculation.org/garrick/kill-9.html