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When I ps aux | grep 'S' I see a few programs that I want to kill. According to man ps the state code for S is interruptible sleep (waiting for an event to complete).
I've tried kill [Process ID (PID)] and also sudo kill [Process ID (PID)]. Despite my efforts they're all still in interruptible sleep. NB: I don't want to kill all (killall) the PIDs.
Q: Is there anyway of killing these PIDs? Or an alternative way of stopping them?
kill -9 [PID value] kills that particular PID. To better understand we can consider kill -9 to act like a power shortage, just on that single process/PID. The PID will be terminated unconditionally - without the chance of cleaning up/flush the caches by the operating system. This in turn may result to zombie processes appearing, but they will disappear upon reboot. As for the resources, the operating system will reclaim these resources after the PID has been kill -9'ed.
kill -9(i.e.,kill -KILL)? Might these processes be catching or ignoring SIGTERM?kill -9 [PID]? And what doeskill -9do, because I don't want inadvertentlykillother PIDs in the server.killwithsudoprivileges, and you haven't read thekillman page! Oh my!man killbut I've concluded thatkill -9 [PID No]is going nuclear. So I just want to reconfirm. I've messed up by running the same program multiple times in the background, which is why I want to kill them now.kill -9 0. (Don't aim a gun at something unless you want to kill it.) If you're trying to kill your own processes, there's no reason to usesudo: it doesn't make the command more effective, but it does make it more dangerous.