`pkill -9 -f firefox` won't work, what can be a possible explanation?
My friend was running firefox on linux mint, and it froze and he used xkill to kill firefox. But still it shows up in htop ps -aux. He tried to kill it multiple times but it didn't work. See the pictures for explanation. We had to kill power to shutdown, even systemd can't stop that process.
5 replies
Yes, I killed the parent process. Also after killing the process with firefox PID, the file equivalent to that process
/proc/PIDwas still there. I think it could be - "likely I/O or driver related" or "stuck in a syscall waiting on some kind of I/O operation that isn’t timing out/is bugged out/can never complete".killtakes a process ID (i.e. a number) not a process name. Either find the right PID withpsfirst or usekillall, although be aware thatkillalldoes exactly what it says: kills all processes matching the string it is given. If you only want to kill one of several Firefox processes that isn't what you want.Sorry my mistake, it was
pkill, but we also triedkillwith process id, and we also triedkillall. Every method that I knew i tried.Did you literally type kill -9 firefox? Because the kill command normally takes PIDs not process names. killall takes process names, but process names are not always straightforward. Under normal circumstances firefox would exit when X/Wayland goes away though.
Using the sysrq key in the "reverse BUSIER" sequence when your system won't shutdown/reboot is always better than shutting the power on a running system.
Sorry, it was a mistake, I fixed the post. Also I tried many other ways to kill that process. Thanks for the BUSIER tip.