signals | Linuxaria

Linux Terminal: Manage Processes with killall and kill

Feb 192014

Original article by http://blog.shineservers.com/

Sometime a process “hang” both if you are using Gnu/Linux on your desktop (maybe a game ?) or as server, in these cases the best thing to do it’s to terminate that process, that probably is using precious resources, the basic commands to do this from a terminal are kill and killall.

killall is a tool for ending running processes on your system based on name. In contrast, kill terminates processes based on process ID number or “PID.” kill and killallcan also send specific system signals to processes. Use killall and kill in conjunction with tools including ps to manage processes and end processes that have become stuck or unresponsive when necessary.

How to put in pause any process in Linux

Guides 1 Response »

Nov 102013

Linux is much better at multitasking processor-intensive tasks than Windows. I remember how virus scanning used to make by old Windows PC almost unusable. Linux is much better, but sometimes bad things happens ! Perhaps a plugin of your browser is using all the CPU, or some bad software is freezing your system, or Apache it’s eating up all your resources on your server.

If you have seen some situation like these, don’t worry anymore, you don’t need to kill all the offending processes, restart your graphical session, or even worse restart the computer, you can simply put the specific process in “PAUSE” and analyse the situation, in some cases you could find the cause of a poor performing process, or just restart it in a second moment, maybe after you have saved all your works, when you can give to that process all the CPU.
Continue reading »

Signals in Linux

Guides 3 Responses »

May 112011

While i was surfing the net i’ve found this article By Matteo Ferrone about Linux signals, that i want to repost:

A signal is an event sent by the kernel to a running program.

The signals can arrive at any time and software can choose what to do when it arrives: it can decide to ignore it or may decide to execute a signal handler and continue with what he did.

There are 31 different signals, and you can see them with:

kill -l

Of these there are 6 to be known by system administrators:
Continue reading »