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Shray
Asked: 2019-01-03 03:22:49 +0800 CST

Quit specific GUI application showing “save the changes” dialogue box

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ps aux | grep -i office | awk {'print $2'} | xargs kill

I can use the above command to kill LibreOffice but it will abruptly kill the process. But I wish to do it the same way it happens when I shut down the system. So it asks me if I wish to save any changes before closing the dialogue box.

Edit: I am building a tool in which I need to kill other processes running. So I wanted to know how to give a chance of closing gracefully to these applications.

command-line kill

1 Answers

  1. Any of the POSIX signals you can send will close the application immediately.

    You can use wmctrl:

    wmctrl -c LibreOffice

    Use -F to search strictly.

    Notes

    • Very similar to How can I kill a specific X window
    • You can also try with xdottool
    • To kill a specific window you can list them wmctrl -l and then close it with wmctrl -ic ID.
    • Warn: If the process is stuck it may not notice that you closed the window. The window will be gone, but the process will still be there and possibly consume CPU and RAM.
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