Terminating or killing stalled apps

[sheds]

Hi, i just opened Gnome iconedit and it went dead. How do i kill or terminate this program and get the windows closed? Thanks for the help!!!

[sether]

there are several ways of doing this. i prefer running top from a terminal window and then pressing k (kill) and then the pid number after it.

i think there have been several recent threads on killing apps, so for alternatives to the solution i offered, just do a search of the forums.

[sheds]

I found this other way on another site, and it worked:

<Ctrl><Alt><Esc>
(in X-windows, KDE) Kill the window I am going to click with my mouse pointer (the pointer changes to something like a death symbol). Similar result can be obtained with the command xkill (typed in X-terminal). Useful when an X-window program does not want to close (hangs?).

[Dolda2000]

However, xkill will just make the X server disconnect the socket to that process, in the expectation that it will die by itself once it discovers that it no longer has an X connection. If the process is stuck in some loop somewhere outside any X code, however, it won't ever detect that condition, and thus will not actually die and go on taking up cycles until you actually kill it.

[sheds]

The right way to kill a stalled app is via command then?

[kghoshal]

The best method to kill a process(stalled or unstalled) is kill -9 <process-id>
or killall -9 <process-name>. You can get the process id from the ps -ae command.

P.s.: the "-9" stands for the forcible termintion

[sheds]

Thanks, i am reading the help files on ps to learn more.