The kill command provides you with a direct way to stop command processes that you no longer want. This is particularly useful when you make a mistake typing a command that takes a long time to run.
To terminate a process:
The following example illustrates this procedure:
$ ps PID TTY TIME COMMAND 1291 co 0:12 -bin/csh (csh) 3250 p0 0:00 ps 1286 p1 0:05 -bin/csh (csh) 3248 p1 0:05 vi commands $ kill 1291 [1} Terminated -bin/csh/ (csh) $ |
Note that a faster way of determining the right PID is to pipe ps output through grep as follows:
$ ps | grep commandname |
where commandname is the name of the command process you want to stop.
If you need to forcibly terminate a process, you can use the -9 option to the ps command as follows:
$ kill -9 PID# |
where PID# is the process identification number of the process you want to stop.