How to Kill an Unwanted Process on a UNIX System
There may come a time when you have an unwanted process running on
the UNIX system - perhaps a runaway SAS job or a leftover email connection
from another computer. Here is how you can kill such a process.
1. Enter the command 'ps -ef | grep username' where 'username' is your
own login id. Here's as example:
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irv@gerisparc> ps -ef | grep irv
irv 16485 243 0 08:04:45 ? 0:03 imapd
irv 22149 243 1 12:46:22 ? 0:00 imapd
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The first column of the output is your user id; the second column is
your process id number; the fifth column is the time the process started;
and the last column is what that process is doing. In this case user 'irv'
has 2 processes running the imap daemon, reading email, and the earlier
process will lock the email file, preventing the later process from
reading it.
2. Next enter the command 'kill -9 process_id' using the id of the process
you need to get rid of. This example would kill the earlier email
process, freeing up the email file to be read by the later process.
irv@gerisparc> kill -9 16485
Only a system administrator can kill another user's process. A normal
user can only kill his or her own.
