This post will guide you how to kill or terminate a process in Linux operating systems. How do I use kill command to stop Process in Linux or Unix system.
- Kill Process by PID
- Kill Process by Process Name
- Kill two or More Processes by PIDs
- Kill Processes Using Killall command
Kill Process by PID
If you want to kill a running process by PID from the command line in your Linux system, and you can use kill command. And the syntax is as below:
$ sudo kill PID $ sudo kill -9 PID $ sudo kill -SIGTERM PID
For example, you wish to kill a running process called “mysql”, and you need to find the process ID with pgrep or ps command, and then kill it with kill command. Type:
$ pgrep mysql
Or
$ ps aux | grep mysql
Outputs:
devops@devops:~$ pgrep mysql 5376 devops@devops:~$ ps aux | grep mysql mysql 5376 1.9 17.8 1157388 179692 ? Sl 02:41 0:00 /usr/sbin/mysqld --daemonize --pid-file=/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid devops 5413 0.0 0.1 21532 1156 pts/3 S+ 02:42 0:00 grep --color=auto mysql
From the above outputs, you would notice that the process ID of mysql is 5376.
To kill mysql process, type one of the following commands:
$ kill 5376
Or
$ kill -9 5376
Kill Process by Process Name
If you want to kill process by process name, and you can use pkill command. The syntax is:
$ sudo pkill processName $ sudo pkill mysql
Kill two or More Processes by PIDs
If you want to two or more processes by PID in a single command, and you can use the kill command, the syntax is:
$ kill pid1 pid2
Or
$ kill -9 pid1 pid2
Kill Processes Using Killall command
If you want to kill any process matching a given string or process name, and you can use killall command. For example, you wish to terminate the process named “mysql”, just type the following command:
$ sudo killall mysql
If you want to get more further information about those commands, and you can see man pages with the following commands:
$ man kill $ man pkill $ man killall $ man pgrep
Conclusion
You should know that how to kill or terminate a running process in CentOS or RHEL Or Ubuntu Linux systems with kill/pkill/killall commands.