How kill cp in Linux?

Question

I see in:

ps aux 

that exists process like:

cp  file.txt /home/file.txt

This file is very big.

I try to kill like:

kill -9 12345

12345 is pid. But without success. What else I can do? What the reason?

P.S. 12345 0.0 0.0 7890 704 ? D 14:42 0:05 cp

Solution 1

Just try CTRL+C in the terminal which cp works in. (I've assumed that you didn't send cp to background, which I don't do often.)

Solution 2

You can't kill process if it waits for some kernel syscall. For example if drive is busy or filesystem is otherwise locked up then you can't kill this process. How does your process look like if you do "ps -l". WCHAN and STAT are attributes you need to look at.

Comments

[Patrick B.]

Please give the full line of the process in ps aux.

[Karoly Horvath]

kill should work.. do you copy from/to a special drive which can block/jam like CD or some network drive?

[Diogo]

You can stop the process using CTRL+C. This will send a signal to cp stop.