Process Termination Commands
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Course
Difficulty
Intermediate
Video Transcription
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>> Hello Cybrarians and welcome back to
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the Linux plus course here at Cybrary.
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I'm your instructor, Rob Goelz.
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In today's lesson, we're going to be
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talking about process termination.
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Upon completion of this lesson,
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you're going to be able to understand why
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processes might need to be terminated,
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we're going to talk about the difference
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between the different types of kill signals,
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and then we'll see how the kill,
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killall, and pkill commands are used.
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Occasionally a process will get hung up,
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sometimes the process resumes on its own
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and then sometimes it needs a little bit of help.
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Now, process termination is
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required when a process is not only hung
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up but now it's tying up
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resources and causing problems
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with all the other processes.
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In all cases, a command is needed to control
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the process and these are what are
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known as inter-process communication,
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and in Linux, signals are used
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to perform inter-process communication.
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A process signal is a predefined message and
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most well-written applications can receive
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these and act upon these process signals,
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but that does largely dependent on
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the developer and how well
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they programmed their application.
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There are 31 of these process signals in Linux,
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but we don't need to know all of them.
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Really, for the purposes of the exam,
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we only need to know a few of these processes.
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For example, SIGHUP,
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which is this signal number one,
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it hangs up, which means it just reloads
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the process and reloads it with the same process ID.
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We can do a SIGINT,
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which is process ID or signal two,
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and that is a signal interrupt.
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This is what Control C actually does,
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it interrupts the signal.
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We can use SIGKILL,
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which forcibly kills a process.
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We can also do SIGTERM which terminates
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a process gracefully, that's 15.
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Now we could use SIGSTOP,
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which is process ID or signal 20,
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and that stops the terminal or pauses a process
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and this is what we're actually doing when we
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hit Control Z on the keyboard.
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Now, the kill command is what we use
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to terminate or signal a process,
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so those command numbers that we used previously,
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that's what we actually use with kill.
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By default, kill takes a PID and terminates it
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gracefully by using SIGTERM 15.
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If you just do kill and then the process ID,
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it's going to try and
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>> terminate that process gracefully.
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>> But kill has a lot of syntax options,
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and these are all example options
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that you can use to terminate gracefully.
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We could do kill -15 PID,
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we could do kill -TERM,
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PID, we could do kill -s 15 PID,
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and so on and so forth.
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SIGTERM 15 is really
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always the best option to start with.
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You can use any of those syntax above to do that.
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But if you can't get a process to terminate gracefully,
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your SIGKILL is your last resort,
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so you could use SIGKILL,
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the process ID nine,
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and the way that you do that with kill is by doing
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kill -9 and then the process ID and
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that will automatically and instantly
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terminate that process in almost every case.
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Now there are two other kill-related commands
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you should know for the Linux plus exam,
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and those are killall and pkill.
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The killall command is used to kill all processes that
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share a name or some other common characteristic.
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For example, we could do killall httpd,
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and that's going to kill all processes
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that are named HTTPD.
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These are going to be web
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>> processes on a Red Hat server.
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>> We can also do killall -u and then specify user,
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and that will kill all processes that
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are owned by that particular user.
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However, we can also use pkill and
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pkill is used to kill all processes that share a name.
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For example, we could do pkill apache2 and that would
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kill all Apache 2 web processes on
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>> say, an Ubuntu system.
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>> With that, we've reached the end of this lesson,
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and in this lesson,
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we covered why processes may need to be terminated,
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we talked about the different types
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of process or kill signals,
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and then we saw how the kill,
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killall, and pkill commands are used.
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Thanks so much for being here and I look
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forward to seeing you in the next lesson.
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