This is a simple problem, with a simple solution. Which I will forget. Hence the post.
The following command will list all running applications on a Linux system. The first two columns are the user running the application, and the applications program id or “pid”.
ps aux
Example output
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.3 0.0 168444 12104 ? Ss 14:31 0:03 /sbin/init splash
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 14:31 0:00 [kthreadd]
root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? I< 14:31 0:00 [rcu_gp]
root 4 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? I< 14:31 0:00 [rcu_par_gp]
However, it would be ideal to search for a specific application, which we can do by piping the results through “search” using grep.
ps aux | grep nameofprogram
This will list all programs running that include nameofprogram
. We can then use the pid to stop it.
kill -9 pid
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