Preventing the accidental killing of wrong process in htop

Question

I frequently use htop to kill certain processes. To find the process I usually execute "Search" via F3. However, the list of processes refreshes frequently, and in many occasions, before I could press F9 for kill, another process is already highlighted, and thus I end up killing the wrong process! If I'm unlucky enough I end up killing a core process and thus causing a system logout/restart.

Is there any way I can kill a certain process in htop being certain that I won't accidentally end up killing a wrong one?

Answer 1

I don't use htop, but judging from the man page it looks like you could use the space bar to "tag" a process, then the F9/k kill function will apply only to that process.

Space

Tag or untag a process. Commands that can operate on multiple processes, like "kill", will then apply over the list of tagged processes, instead of the currently highlighted one.

...

F9, k

"Kill" process: sends a signal which is selected in a menu, to one or a group of processes. If processes were tagged, sends the signal to all tagged processes. If none is tagged, sends to the currently selected process.

Answer 2

This is probably not a complete solution, but it may help.

See this htop example:

To change the refresh interval of the htop output, use the -d command line option. “htop -d x”. Where x is referred in thenths of seconds.

htop -d 10

So you could change the rate to 30, after which the refresh rate goes to 3 seconds. This is no guarantee, but it makes it easier to navigate and then tag processes.