HPR4627: UNIX Curio #5 - Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Hosted by Vance on 2026-04-28 01:00:00

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HPR Comments

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Antoine says: kill and killall

RE: hpr4627::2026-04-28 UNIX Curio #5 - Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! by Vance
00:14:35 Listen in ogg, opus, or mp3 format.
Nothing to aggregate, only to say– loved learning about Kill. In my first times of Linux, maybe a problem of mine, I had to use it almost daily (in the main purpose, not knowing until now that the command can pause or only return the running status (: ).
I found it magical, because the ctrl+alt+del of Windows was not always responsive in times of trouble, but, in Linux, accessing a terminal to uss "killall X" (or whatever program) was always possible.
Thank you, Vance, 4dshow.

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Vance says: Glad you enjoyed it

RE: hpr4627::2026-04-28 UNIX Curio #5 - Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! by Vance
00:14:35 Listen in ogg, opus, or mp3 format.
Antoine: Not sure if they still support it, but under some window managers you used to be able to press Ctrl-Alt-Esc and the cursor would turn into a large X or a skull and crossbones. You could then click on a window to kill the program that owned it. Similarly, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace would end the entire X session. I think this is no longer common and it might not even be possible under Wayland.

candycanearter07: Very cool, thanks! I've used 'killall' a bunch but was not aware of 'pgrep', 'pkill', and 'pidwait'. They look to have some neat capabilities - maybe you could consider doing an episode on them? (Of course, none of these are in POSIX, so you wouldn't want to use them in a script unless you knew the systems it would be used on have those utilities.)

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candycanearter07 says: Re: Glad you enjoyed it

RE: hpr4627::2026-04-28 UNIX Curio #5 - Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! by Vance
00:14:35 Listen in ogg, opus, or mp3 format.
Vance: The Ctrl-Alt-Esc keybind is actually calling a binary, xkill, and it's pretty easy to just set a keybind in your desktop enviroment to call it. On my system, its bound to shift+alt+x, since its really easy to hit with only my left hand.

Also, I figured those weren't POSIX but they're still useful for day to day terminaling and little personal scripts

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candycanearter07 says: killer episode

RE: hpr4627::2026-04-28 UNIX Curio #5 - Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! by Vance
00:14:35 Listen in ogg, opus, or mp3 format.
I didn't know about kill -0, thats a cool POSIX way to check if a process is existing or not. In most of my scripts, I used the p* commands instead (pgrep, pkill, pwait) since usually getting a specific process by pid didn't matter and they all support passing a pidfile directly with -F

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