lk/basics/kill.md

---
title: "kill"
tags: [ "Documentation", "Basics" ]
---

If you want to kill a program in a graphical environment, open a terminal and type:

# Graphical Programs

```bash
xkill
```

Then click on the application which you want to kill.

# All Programs

To kill a program, find it with:

```bash
pgrep discord
```

This will give you the UUID, e.g. `19643`.

Kill the program with:

```bash
kill 19643
```

# Types of Kill

To see an ordered list of termination signals:

```bash
kill -l
```

> 1) SIGHUP   2) SIGINT   3) SIGQUIT  4) SIGILL   5) SIGTRAP

> 6) SIGABRT  7) SIGBUS   8) SIGFPE   9) SIGKILL 10) SIGUSR1

> 11) SIGSEGV 12) SIGUSR2 13) SIGPIPE 14) SIGALRM 15) SIGTERM


You can select these levels with a '- number'.
Higher numbers are roughly equivalent to insistence.

For example:

```bash
kill -1 3498
```

This roughly means 'maybe stop the program, if you can, maybe reload'.

Or the famous:

```bash
kill -9 3298
```

This means 'kill the program dead, now, no questions, dead'.

**Beware** - if Firefox starts another program to connect to the internet, and you `kill -9 firefox`, this will leave all of Firefox's internet connection programs ("children") still there, but dead and useless.

# Sobriquets

- A dead program which sits there doing nothing is known as a 'zombie'.
- A program which is run by another program is called a 'child program'.
- A child whose parent program is dead is called an 'orphan'.
- A child who remains running despite being useless because the parent is dead is called an 'orphan zombie'.