kill - no process found

Question

when I list my processes I have:

root@adam-ThinkPad-T410:~# ps -e | grep signals
11641 pts/0 00:00:00 signals
11642 pts/0 00:00:00 signals
11643 pts/0 00:00:00 signals

but when I want to kill I get info that there is no such process:

root@adam-ThinkPad-T410:~# killall -9 11641
11641: no process found

I'm quite new to linux and a little bit confused I tried also "kill 11641" - but still no luck

Solution 1

killall expects a process name, e.g. killall signals which kills all such processes. Otherwise you should use the process id (which you extraced correctly from ps): kill -9 <PID> where -9 is SIGKILL and is rather rude, normally a kill <PID> is enough (but that sems not to work in your case). man killall and man kill are your friends.

Solution 2

The grep command returns itself as a process when you pipe it from another command. I suppose that the process 11641 is the grep process, which essentially has exited (and cannot be killed the way you are trying to terminate it).

Try to do this:

ps -e | grep signals | grep -v grep

That essentially removes the grep process from the result.

Comments

[Admin]

kill 11641 gives exactly the same error? (I doubt that.) Or do you mean, the process is still alive?

[xwhyz]

no, I still have the same id's

[mpy]

@NicoleHamilton: Sorry ;)

[Nicole Hamilton]

LOL. Not at all. I see you're a relatively new member and can probably use the additional rep points more than me anyway. (The one upvote you got already was mine.) Keep up the good work.

[ezdazuzena]

ps -e | grep [s]ignals saves you the grep -v .. I got it from another post here which I unfortunately do not remember and thus can't credit on

[miguelmorin]

Today I learned that this search matches the grep process itself, and this solved my problem.