How to force a PID to terminate?

process kill process-management pkill

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kill -KILL $PID or kill -9 $PID will forcibly terminate $PID, unless you don't have the permissions to do so (i.e., it belongs to a different user and you're not root), but be very careful with it. Inflicting it on a process will prevent it from doing any kind of filesystem (or other) cleanup.

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voices

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

voices over 1 year

Yes, I've tried all the basic kill, pkill, etc. methods that come up with a Google search.
Sometimes it works, other times it seems something is preventing the process from terminating.
There is no stderr message when the kill command fails, but ps, pgrep, etc. show the process is still running.

Is there a more forceful way to do this? Thanks.
- Amit24x7 almost 7 years
  
  Try kill -9 <PID>
- voices almost 7 years
  
  First thing I tried. I thought it would work too, but no such luck in this instance, unfortunately.
- terdon almost 7 years
  
  OK, what happened when you tried? Did you get an error message? Nothing? What does the output of ps show for this process? Please edit your question and add this information.
- terdon almost 7 years
  
  Yes, but can you please show us the output of ps so we can see what it reports for the process? Also, if you've tried kill -9 and that also fails, add that to your question too. The more detail you give, the more likely it is that we'll be able to answer.
- voices almost 7 years
  
  @terdon No, I can't.
EightBitTony almost 7 years

It's worth remembering that kill -9 might not always stop the process in the time frame you would like - unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5642/…
voices almost 7 years

Yep, tried that.