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.
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
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.
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
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.
I remember that kid! She was friends with that boy named Sue, right? Both of them always hanging out with little Bobby tables?
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.
True, xkill is super easy to use. Who needs a task manager, if you can just click on the program you want to close.
KWin has this shortcut (Ctrl + Win + Esc) that turns your cursor into a skull that kills the windows you click on
I use the terminal on a daily basis. My job involves writing software for terminals.
Ctrl+Meta+Esc in KDE is still how I kill a misbehaving graphical app.