Small, Sharp Software Tools

Terminating Processes

Every so often, a program misbehaves. Sometimes it’s due to something you configured incorrectly. Other times it’s because the program has a bug. You’ve probably experienced a stuck program before and figured out a way to kill the task using a graphical task manager. You can manage tasks from the command-line interface as well. All you need is the process ID.

Let’s start a long-running task in the background. In your terminal, execute this command:

$ sleep 9999999 &
[1] 23841

This process is now running. Use the jobs -l command to list the running background jobs and show the process ID in addition to the job ID:

$ jobs -l
[1]+ 23841 Running                 sleep 999999 &

The kill command terminates processes by ...