this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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My friend was running firefox on linux mint, and it froze and he used xkill to kill firefox. But still it shows up in htop ps -aux. He tried to kill it multiple times but it didn't work. See the pictures for explanation. We had to kill power to shutdown, even systemd can't stop that process.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

kill takes a process ID (i.e. a number) not a process name. Either find the right PID with ps first or use killall, although be aware that killall does exactly what it says: kills all processes matching the string it is given. If you only want to kill one of several Firefox processes that isn't what you want.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Sorry my mistake, it was pkill, but we also tried kill with process id, and we also tried killall. Every method that I knew i tried.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did you literally type kill -9 firefox? Because the kill command normally takes PIDs not process names. killall takes process names, but process names are not always straightforward. Under normal circumstances firefox would exit when X/Wayland goes away though.

Using the sysrq key in the "reverse BUSIER" sequence when your system won't shutdown/reboot is always better than shutting the power on a running system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sorry, it was a mistake, I fixed the post. Also I tried many other ways to kill that process. Thanks for the BUSIER tip.