How to force kill process in Linux using kill and killall

In Linux, you can use the kill and killall commands to force kill a process.

The kill command is used to send a signal to a process, with the default signal being SIGTERM, which terminates the process gracefully. If the process does not respond to the SIGTERM signal, you can use the -9 option to send the SIGKILL signal, which forces the process to terminate immediately.

Here’s an example of how to use the kill command to force kill a process with the process ID of 12345:

The killall command is used to kill multiple processes based on their names, rather than their process IDs.

Here’s an example of how to use the killall command to force kill all processes named myprocess:

Note that both the kill and killall commands require elevated privileges, so you will typically need to run them as the root user or using sudo.

It’s also important to be cautious when using the kill and killall commands, as force killing a process can cause data loss or corruption. Before using these commands, consider other methods of stopping a process, such as sending the SIGTERM signal or using a process management tool such as systemd or init.d.