kill a process

have you seen a defuncting daemon service or linux command just sitting around the user space and wasting your memory resources?

one alternative way to kill a pid process is using linux kill command, this comes in handy specially doing it from a utility test bed server for evaluating a certain open source package or linux applications.

let us say, that you want to kill a defuncting program named dovecot. the PID (pid ID), as blogged before, should be identified. Let us identify the said daemonized service of dovecot by issuing

#pidof dovecot

The above would return you a numeric values unless the program is not running, same goes with

#ps axuw | grep dovecot

If you see more numeric values, it must be children spawned by the daemon service. These values should be killed as well.

#kill -9 NUMERICVALUE

should easily terminate a pid with a value of NUMERICVALUE .

There was an instance during old days that a certain defuncting and unstable program hogs down system resources unnoticeably more likely due to memory leaks or unchecked buffer flows.