How to Forcefully Close a Program in Ubuntu 14.04 (2 Methods)

There may be times when you execute several processes simultaneously on your Linux operating system, and some of the process among them became unresponsive. At this point of time, you need to close that process and restart it once again. In this post, we are providing two methods by which you can forcefully abort your unresponsive process easily.

You can use your terminal as well as gnome system monitor (GUI) to close any process. Just have a glance at this article to find out how to forcefully close a program in Ubuntu 14.04.

Steps to forcefully close a program:

Method 1 of 2:

Step 1: Open your terminal by using “Ctrl + ALT + T” key combination, type “ps -A” (where ‘ps’ command is used to list all your current processes) and then hit enter.

Step 2: You’ll see a list of programs that are currently running on your system with their process id and execution time.

Step 3: Now, type “killall PID” (where PID stands for process id), as I want to close the Firefox browser whose PID is 1981 so I can write “killall 1981”.

Step 4: You can also use “process name” to close the unwanted program, just type “killall process_name” (For eg. “killall firefox-bin”).

Method 2 of 2:

Step 1: Go to ‘Administration’ and select “System Monitor” as shown in the image below.

Step 2: You can also go to your unity dash and then type “gnome-system-monitor”. You’ll see a system monitor icon, just click on that to open.

Step 3: You’ll see a system monitor window. Here, just right click on the desired process which you want to close. As I want to close Firefox browser so after right click, choose “Kill Process” option.

Step 4: Finally you may see an alert window, just read the message carefully and if you still want to close the process then click on “Kill Process” button, as shown in the image below.