Questions about identifying processes, about listing them, sending signals, killing them, assigning and using process priorities.
A computer program is a passive collection of instructions; a process is the actual execution of those instructions.
Questions tagged [process]
792 questions
361
votes
7 answers
What is a process, and why doesn't it get killed?
The chrome browser was not responsive and I tried to kill it, but instead of disappearing the process had at its right, and didn't get killed:
What is for a process and why it doesn't it get killed?
Eduard Florinescu
- 8,587
262
votes
11 answers
How do I kill processes in Ubuntu?
How do I kill all processes running by my own non-root account?
I have some spinning smbd processes that I caused from my windows machine and so I telnetted into the linux server and I want to kill those spinning processes. I don't have authority…
djangofan
- 3,874
207
votes
8 answers
How to kill all tmux sessions (or at least multiple sessions) from the CLI?
How to kill all tmux sessions (or at least multiple sessions) from the (Ubuntu) CLI?
When I do ps aux | grep tmux I see 3 processes:
UU 2970 0.0 0.0 19556 1228 pts/0 S+ 02:48 0:00 tmux
UU 3445 0.0 0.0 12944 988 pts/5 S+ …
user423047
202
votes
8 answers
"kill " not really killing the process, why?
I am trying to improve my command line skills and I have encountered a problem where I cannot kill a process. I type kill 2200 where 2200 is my PID and the process is not killed. After few minutes wait is still in the top and ps aux.
I have even…
Patryk
- 9,416
190
votes
10 answers
Running programs in the background from terminal
How do I run a program in the background of a shell, with the ability to close the shell while leaving the program running?
Lets say my UI is having problems or for some reason, I need to boot up a program from the terminal window, say,…
OVERTONE
- 2,407
188
votes
11 answers
How to find the Process ID (PID) of a running terminal program?
I am running a program in the terminal that I can't escape with Ctrl-C and that I want to kill. How can I find its PID?
Jjed
- 14,064
183
votes
9 answers
How to find zombie process?
System information as of Fri Mar 9 19:40:01 KST 2012
System load: 0.59 Processes: 167
Usage of /home: 23.0% of 11.00GB Users logged in: 1
Swap usage: 0% IP address for eth1: 192.168.0.1
…
Pablo
- 2,597
165
votes
5 answers
What are zombie processes?
With commands like top and the gui based System Monitor I can see that at the moment I have several zombie processes.
What are zombie processes?
Do they affect the performance of the system or the application they are zombie to. Do they use too much…
Jesper
- 2,247
163
votes
12 answers
How to determine whether a process is running or not and make use it to make a conditional shell script?
How can I determine if a process is running or not and then have a bash script execute some stuff based on that condition?
For example:
if process abc is running, do this
if it is not running, do that.
Nirmik
- 7,938
162
votes
3 answers
Process 'niceness' vs. 'priority'
When running top, I can see this (shortened) example output:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4586 ipc-adm+ 20 0 1303900 605152 92844 S 30,6 29,3 3:52.88 firefox
3985 ipc-adm+ 20 0 258588…
Byte Commander
- 110,243
146
votes
8 answers
What is the equivalent of 'Control-Alt-Delete'?
On Windows anytime the system hangs Ctrl-Alt-Del brings up the Start Up Manager, from which you can end the program or process causing the hang.
Is there any command like this on Ubuntu?
Mysterio
- 12,288
146
votes
2 answers
What is the technical difference between a daemon, a service and a process?
I want to know that what are differences in behavior of a daemon, a process and a service running in Ubuntu.
krupal6022
- 1,689
124
votes
5 answers
How do I get the parent process ID of a given child process?
How to get parent PID from a given child's PID?
I know I can manually check it under /proc, I wonder if there is a smart/better way to achieve this in Ubuntu. Note the parent may or may not be killed.
Thanks
cache
- 1,541
102
votes
8 answers
How do I search for a process by name without using grep?
In order to search for a process you can use ps with grep.
For example to search for firefox
ps aux | grep firefox
How to get the same answer without using grep?
Maythux
- 87,123
102
votes
5 answers
What's the difference between 'killall' and 'pkill'?
After using just plain kill on Unix systems for many years, I learned pkill from a younger Linux-savvy co-worker colleague1.
I soon accepted the Linux-way,pgrep-ing and pkill-ing through many days and nights, through slow-downs and race…
belacqua
- 23,540