Sometimes you can’t even move the app window around the screen. Unresponsive programs and apps typically have grayed-out buttons or options that don’t work. You can also use the single command below using killall to send the same signal: To send the kill signal, run the following commands to kill all four instances of Chrome successfully: We learned from the ps command above that the PIDs for the instances of Chrome are 3827, 3919, 10764, and 11679. SIGSTOP to stop the processSIGNINT to interrupt the keyboardSIGKILL to kill the signal There are other signals you can send to both commands, depending upon the results you want.Īs an example, if you want to kill the unresponsive process and then restart it, you will use the HUP (hang up) signal.

Kill – Kill a process by IDkillall – Kill a process by name

You now have the two pieces of information needed to kill a frozen process on Linux: its name and ID. The command below will show you the running processes associated with Chrome: To identify the specific instance of Chrome you want to kill, use the ps command and grep to filter the output. You can see that there are four instances of Chrome that are running with the following PIDs: For example, let’s say Chrome is the frozen program on your computer. The screenshot above shows a lot of information. From the command line, type the following: Top is a command line-based system monitor. If you don’t know which process is frozen on Linux, two tools will help you find the process: top and ps. An advantage of this method is that it works on all Linux systems. PID is a number that automatically identifies each process when created on any Linux OS. Use The Kill Command #īefore you can use the kill command, your system needs to know the Process ID (PID) of the unresponsive program.

There are several ways to kill or quit a frozen program on Linux.

Osx process monitor