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I am dealing with some essentially virus-like behavior that I'd like to end.
A task 'foo' is running on my computer, generating a lot of calls that are bringing my system performance to its knees. I can kill that task:
for i in `ps -x -U root | grep -i foo | cut -d' ' -f2`; do sudo kill -9 $i ; done
Unfortunately, an unknown task 'bar' is immediately re-launching foo. I have root access. I'm very tired of having my machine being disabled. How do i make this stop?
You can use cat /proc/{foo pid}/status | grep PPid to get the pid of the parent process.
You can then use cat /proc/{bar pid}/cmdline to find out the command.
If it really happens to be a virus, you should perhaps entirely remove linux then reinstall it.
The ps command can show you the parent pid in the PPID column. This will show you the process that started process "foo". You can then kill this PPID. Also the -C flag can select on process name.
