43 points
*

Super easy

Sudo rm -rf /*

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29 points

I thought that removes the French language pack?

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12 points

Oui

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8 points

yeah it probably does

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5 points

No, that’s rm -fr /*

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5 points

Pedant time: That actually wouldn’t kill any process that’s already loaded in memory and running. Unless the process attempts to access something else from the filesystem and crashes.

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29 points

It’s easy. Just open up a terminal and type

kill $PID

(Replace the $PID with the process id of the process) if you don’t know the process id you can do

killall process_name

If these don’t work you can add a -9 to banish them and give them no chance to resist

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5 points

Similarly, $$ is the current PID, $PPID is the parent PID. (Bash)

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3 points

So ‘kill -9 $$’ is just suicide?

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5 points

With suicide, you have a chance to get your affairs in order. kill -9 $$ is hiring an assassin to kill you and not tell you when it will happen. It happens suddenly without warning.

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3 points

You can type seppuku for that

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5 points

Also please refresh my memory on how to find the process ID

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11 points

You can do

ps aux | grep -i <part of process name>

and the PID is in the second column of the output. However for this use case I recommend a process manager like htop or btop

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5 points

I use ps -aux | grep $EXECUTABLE

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2 points

htop or any process monitor will tell you.

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1 point

Pidof

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1 point

top for Ubuntu at least will show you the top processes, I think sorted by averaged CPU usage.

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4 points

You probably want to get on the habit of using pkill instead of killall in case you’re ever on a different system. You could have a surprise.

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28 points

Uninterruptible sleep makes this harder than it looks

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19 points

Kid named process:

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3 points

I remember that kid! She was friends with that boy named Sue, right? Both of them always hanging out with little Bobby tables?

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18 points

xkill (assuming GUI and not headless/remote)

xkill lets you click on any X application, at which point it will close the X server connection. In most cases the client application will self-terminate at the loss of the X connection. It’s wonderfully straightforward.

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5 points

True, xkill is super easy to use. Who needs a task manager, if you can just click on the program you want to close.

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