Basic Unix Appendix D: Killing Inactive Processes

Question:

I had to close a connection window; how do I tell Unix that I'm no longer logged in?

How do I stop programs I can't get back into to quit?

Answer:

Stopping a program is referred to as "killing a process." In order to kill a process, you'll need to do two things: first, use the ps command to find out what the process number is, and then use the kill</TT> command to stop the process.

  1. Type "ps -ef | grep myusername" (no quotes) at the ">" prompt. You'll get output formatted like this: 
     myusername 21414 17383 0 11:57:25 pts/29 0:00 mail
 myusername 23477 17383 0 12:16:08 pts/29 0:00 grep myusername
 myusername 21513 21414 0 11:58:34 pts/29 0:00 /usr/local/bin/tcsh -c /usr/local/bin/less
 myusername 17383 17380 0 11:23:25 pts/29 0:02 -tcsh
 myusername 21515 21513 0 11:58:34 pts/29 0:00 /usr/local/bin/less
  2. Look at the lines, and find the oldest row (see the starting times in the middle -- fifth column) which has "-tcsh" in the far right column.
  3. Type "kill -9 #####" (again, no quotes) where ##### is the entry in the second column for that row. That will kill the old process.

    The tcsh process is the "shell" -- the basic "display a > and wait for the person to tell me what program to run" program that all other programs run over. Usually killing a tcsh program will kill all the programs run in that session. However, if it doesn't, simply repeat this step for all other programs which don't end automatically.

Last updated: 10/03/06