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js-coder
Asked: 2012-01-01 14:10:51 +0800 CST

How to kill a process when I cant kill it via the GUI and kill in the terminal?

  • 772

I have some weird Skype crashes today. If I try to close it via the X nothing happens. I tried to kill the process over the KDE Process Manager (Ctrl+ESC).

I even tried to kill Skype via the terminal:

killall skype
kill (skypes process number)

None of the both worked. Right now I got to relogin to get it working again, and it keeps crashing every 15mins. I'm using KDE 4.7 and Ubuntu 11.10.

skype

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    These days killall will also let you pass in a signal (to save you needing to look up a PID):

    killall -9 skype
    • 27

  2. use this :

    kill -9 $(pgrep skype)

    • 20

  3. To kill a process/application in a Terminal type

    $ ps -e | grep skype

    this will show the skype process ID

    e.g, it shows,

    2338 ?        00:00:33 skype

    type

    $ kill 2338

    in GUI configure a short cut key for xKill, (like I have configured to Ctrl + Alt + Bkspace) once you will press the combination, you will get a small cross symbol X instead of mouse cursor .... select the application window with that cross cursor with mouse and it will kill that application.

    • 4

  4. I automated all this:

    1. Made a stop-skype.sh file which contained:
        #!/bin/bash
    #stop-skype.sh
    kill $(ps aux | grep '[s]kype' | awk '{print $2}')

    1. Made this file executeable

    2. In /usr/share/applications, made skype-shutdown.desktop containing:

    [Desktop Entry]
Name=Skype Shutdown
Comment=Shut down Skype running in the background
Exec=/home/volker/stop-skype.sh
Icon=/home/volker/stop-skype.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;

    1. Made a stop-skype.png file which you can download from http://www.freemed.info/.download/stop-skype.png

    2. Opened Files and dragged the /usr/share/applications/skype-shutdown.desktop to Cairo Dock.

    This resulted in an icon on which one can click to stop all Skype processes.

    See: http://www.freemed.info/.download/Skype-shutdown.png

    • 1 
  5. kill -9 `ps -ef |grep skype | awk {print'$2'}`

    Because

    1. ps -ef lists all proccess .

    2. grep skype filters only skype proccess

    3. awk {print'$2'} retrieves the 2nd column of output which is PID

    • 0

  6. Create a bat-file and put this in:

    taskkill /f /im "SkypeApp.exe" /im "Skype.exe" /im "SkypeBackgroundHost.exe" /im "SkypeBridge.exe"

    Open task scheduler and create a task on logon with 1 minute delay and link it to the bat-file.

    After restart roll-over the skype icon and it will disappear (it's a refresh :)

    • 0