How To Kill Application Process ID (PID) The Faster Way

At times, we need to kill an application immediately for some reasons. Sending a termination signal to a process rehups and kills a process ID (PID). This can easily be done in several ways.

Here are many alternatives way on killing PIDs.

Kill A Process ID

Traditionally, with X installed, one can install a taskbar shortcut named force quit and use that shortcut to a kill an existing application directly by simply left-clicking on the application's window area. Force quit then kills the corresponding application's PID easily.

Next, is by using the linux command kill from terminal. Linux command kill requires an explicitly defined  process ID as a parameter to kill the specific process ID.

Now, here's a faster way to kill a process ID by simply defining the binary name of the program and using pkill from terminal.

PKill Usage

# pkill program-name

For example, launch kopete binary. To kill kopete PID, simply

# pkill kopete

Another example, launch ksnaphot. To kill ksnapshot using pkill

# pkill ksnapshot

Pkill simply looks up the currently specified process name and immediately terminates it.

All is done.