CertiGuide to A+ (A+ 4 Real)  9  Chapter 5: The Linux Operating System       9  Command Line Functions And Administrative Utilities            9  Process Management

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Sometimes a process will hang or not terminate properly. The kill command allows one to be able to stop or terminate a process. The form of this command is:

kill [options] PID

Usually simply using kill followed by process ID will kill the the referenced process (one must either be the user that started the process or root to do this). Sometimes a process will not respond to a kill signal sent in this manner. There are several levels of kill (sounds like some sort of video-game) which will be more „forceful’ in the way it attempts to kill or terminate a process. kill -l will give a list of all such kill signals, where kill -9 should cause any process to terminate.

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