Well, this one is not so hard after all. You have many ways to do it. You can do it by finding the PID of the program which stopped responding, and then using the kill command to terminate it, or you can use the xkill tool or other graphical tools such as the ones that show the process tree.
The first thing
to do to terminate a misbehaving program is to find its PID, or
process ID. To do so, execute the following from a console:
ps aux | grep mozilla-firefox-bin, supposing
that Firefox is the misbehaving program. You will get
something like the following, which tells you among other things
that Firefox was started by user peter and that its PID
is 3505
:
peter 3505 1.7 5.0 82208 25804 ? Sl 09:30 0:01 /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox-1.0.6/mozilla-firefox-bin
Now that we have the PID of the misbehaving program, we can execute the kill command to terminate it. So we execute the following: kill -9 3505, and that's it! Firefox is killed. Note that this is only to be used when the program doesn't respond to your input anymore. Do not use it as a standard means of exiting from applications.
Actually, we sent
the KILL
signal to the process number
3505
. The kill command
accepts other signals besides KILL
, so you can
have greater control over your processes. For more info, see
kill(1).