In my Ubuntu launcher I have two icons with question marks on them. When I hover my mouse over them they read "Already Executing". What is this and can I remove them? I am an extremely zero-experienced Linux user and would appreciate an answer even I could understand. -Thank you :)
3 Answers
Every program, when runs, is a process. Processes are an important
part of any OS. Each process has its own, unique ID, which is a number.
You can send signals to a process to kill it. This is explained below.
Managing processes, beginner's manual
First open a Terminal (press Ctrl+Alt+T).
A terminal allows you to run commands on your computer,
and see what they output.
Once the terminal is open, type:
pidof firefox
Press ENTER to issue the command, and if you had Firefox open,
it will output something like that:
14497
Which means “a process named ‘firefox’ is running and his ID is 14497”.
Now, to kill that process:
kill <PID>
Replace PID
with the process ID (in this case 14497
) of the process
you want to kill. Press ENTER and Firefox will close.
Now, if you run pidof firefox
again, it shouldn't output anything,
because there's no longer a Firefox process running.
All at once
Since running pidof
and then kill
ing is tedious, you can simply run:
killall firefox pidgin
And it'll kill all the processes that are named firefox
or pidgin
.
If no processes are found, it'll tell you:
firefox: no process found
pidgin: no process found
-
Thanks for the reply and I think I understand what you're getting at. My problem though is that I don't know what these processes are called or what they do :S They simply appear in my launcher with no description other than "Already Executing". Any tips as to how I can identify what they are so I can find their PID? Mar 4, 2013 at 11:18
-
ps -e
on your terminal
and identifiy those processes.
type
kill <number>
number is the number infront of the process that you want to kill.
But if you don't know what are those processes. It's better to not to kill them.
you can use top
and htop
.
top is installed with Ubuntu.
you can find the process you want and you can kill it if you want but you must be root user.
sudo kill <PID>
htop can give more better look with top but you need to installed it with
sudo apt-get install htop
-
Wrong. You mustn't be
root
to kill something: you can kill your own processes without having to becomeroot
. What you should say is that, being theroot
user, you can kill any process. Mar 10, 2013 at 9:53