Terminating a process

And as always with this meme: Both Windows and Linux can ask a process nicely to terminate or kill it outright. And the default for both is to ask nicely.

Next, you'll tell me I shouldn't get all my news from memes!
on windows a process can get in a state so that it is impossible to make it go away, even with process explorer or process hacker. mostly this also involves the bugged software becoming unusable.
I encounter such a situation from time to time. one way it could happen is if the USB controller has got in an invalid state, which one of my pendrives can semi-reliably reproduce. when that happens, any process attempting to deal with that device or its FS, even the built-in program to remove the drive letter, will stop working and hang as an unkillable process.
- Linux has that issue too. A process in an uninterruptible blocking syscall stays until that syscall finishes, which can be never if something weird's going on.
- I've seen that on Linux as well. Funnily enough also with faulty file systems. I think NFS with spotty wifi for one.
  Oh, and once with a dying RAID controller. That was a pain in the ass. At that point I swore to only ever do RAID in software.
Windows can kill a process outright.
Hmmmm...
- Taskkill /f is reasonably close to sudo kill -9
  Hitting the X in Windows and hitting the X in Linux both cause the application to start a save yourself routine. From the OS standpoint they're not far off.
  The problem is we have a lot of confirmation bias in windows because every time we want to close an application that's not working, that save yourself call has to sit around for a hellaciously long time out followed by a telemetry call so that Microsoft can track that it happened.
  It's pretty rare that Linux apps don't just close.

Sigterm: "End this process or next time I bring my -9"

My tec-9

Actually no, it's just that the programs on Linux usually accept SIGINT, SIGTERM, etc pretty gracefully. Some are even smart enough to handle it on a thread hang. SIGKILL is last resort.

Lots of Windows applications like to ignore the close request because Windows doesn't have signals and instead you can only pass a window name to request exit which is the same as clicking the close button.

So any hung software won't respond and you have to terminate it.

This is entirely wrong

“Userid 1000 will shut down in 2 minutes”
Or whatever it says
- I haven't seen that in a while. When you see that it means either that the service didn't handle the terminate signal correctly or that is is busy doing something. (Sometimes both)
Lol yes oh so wrong.
- Wait until you find out about taskill /F /IM explore.exe

you forgot that you have to spend about 2 minutes with windows "searching for a solution" (who knows what that does??) and then another minute reporting it to microsoft

Skill issue.

Typing “kill -9” into a terminal is the equivalent to breaking out the acetylene torch when a nut won’t budge

Can't be tight if it's liquid

Unless it is nfs unmount on down server. Or failed disk...

Bigger fish to fry at that point bub

How the OOM Killer asks a process to terminate:

indiscriminate spraying

mainly wrong, by default kill send a SIGTERM, you can try SIGINT or SIGQUIT too, and in the end SIGKILL of course. Same in windows there is different way

I always go straight for the SIGKILL
- Some software: fork()
  Me: Welcome to the process gauntlet loser, better not hang for a millisecond or you are dead and gone.

TerminateProcess() is pretty reliable, but it doesn't form part of the C signals stack on Windows like kill -9. So for instance, if you're doing process control on Python, you need to use a special Windows-only API to access TerminateProcess().

Never used kill -9. What's the difference between that and taskkill. I usually used taskkill /pid processiwanttokill.exe /f
- Kill -9 is a command on Unix and Linux to send signal 9 (SIGKILL) to a process. That's the version of kill that is the most reliable and has immediate effect.
  Taskkill is a Windows command line program. I believe that taskkill /f uses the TerminateProcess() API. This is more forceful than the End Task button on the Task Manager. There is a different End Process button on the Task Manager that does use TerminateProcess().

xkill is one of my favorite commands

Is there a Wayland equivalent?
- I dunno; I sadly can't use Wayland yet bc I have Nvidia
- Open the process list in your system monitor of choice, right click, signal, sigkill.
  You can also open a monitor and use top or any variant to detect the process number and manually kill -KILL number
Beware the floating X , you don't want to missclick what you're killing lmao

I feel like I've had the opposite experience in the gui (maybe a KDE issue?) closing gui windows frequently lock up, and I find I frequently have to drop to the command line in order to properly kill some programs

That's because the end proces of the GUI sends a sigint, which does jack shit if the program hangs, you only archieve for a higher parent process to obtain it until it can off itself gracefully. You need to right click the process and send a sigkill signal to emulate the command line.

Is there some Linux equivalent to "ctrl + alt + del?" I get that killing a process from the terminal is preferred, but one of the few things I like about windows is if the GUI freezes up, I can pretty much always kill the process by pressing ctrl+alt+del and finding it in task manager. Using Linux if I don't already have the terminal open there are plenty of times I'm just force restarting the computer because I don't know what else to do.

Ctrl+alt+F1/F2/F3 etc.
It lets you switch to another terminal session, where you can use something like top/htop for a commandline equivalent to task manager.
- That's what I don't get about what they said above. If the Windows desktop freezes up, Task Manager won't open either (happened to me quite some times over the years - less so since they moved to the NT kernel though). What you mentioned always works short of kernel panic.
Try ctrl+shift+ESC And remember, there are customizable hotkeys, just explore the settings
- I've heard those quick keys a thousand times but my brain has determined that it is not necessary information for me to retain.
most distros have something, yeah, generally called [something] monitor
Do you have enough swap allocated to your linux machine? I found that my GUI froze frequently due to not having enough of it when the computer was under heavy load.

ps aux | grep

. kill

<pid>

kill -9 $(pidof
<process>
)

I've honestly not had this problem on windows since Windows 8.

KDE now too

KDE can murder windows instantly (you have to set a shortcut), or you can also just send SIGKILL to the process

https://youtu.be/Fow7iUaKrq4

btw funny story since many comments mention NFS/CIFS:

I have a share mounted at /smb and the server sometimes just dies so when I want to unmount it I run umount /smb but my shell (zsh) hangs after typing umount /sm and the b doesn't even show

I guess zsh does a kind of stat() on everything you type but bash came to save the day

I don't know if clean ZSH does it, but if you have the zsh-syntax-highlighting plugin, it tests if the path you're typing exists every time you edit the line.