My first kill

Hehe. I am not a murderous person. It's just that I am happy about my first kill last night.

I was editing some things for the project I am working on. I was running XMMS, GEDIT, the stickies applet, OpenOffice Writer and Epiphany all at once. Then my sister called my attention for something. When I came back to my computer, XMMS froze. Yes, it FROZE. I wasn't sure what to do. There isn't the CTRL-ALT-DEL combo to launch the task manager.

"What now?" I thought to myself and immediately thought of sending SMS to Carl and Mario. But it was already 12 midnight! I opened the Linux documentation but my mind wanted to hold a book physically to quickly scan the pages. Then I remembered that I have a copy of Linux Unleased. (Just a photocopy though.) I started digging up piles and piles of paper all over the house til I found it.

I knew that I was supposed to "KILL" the process. But how do I do that? I flipped through the photocopied pages Linux Unleashed when - Eureka! - I found it. Yay!

I logged in as root to see all the processes.

So what happened?

1. I ran bash and typed su, thinking that by doing this I would see all the processes running.
2. I scanned the pages for the guide on terminating processes.
3. I typed in ps -e to get the processes and the pids.
4. I noted the pid of the process I wanted to kill.
5. I typed kill
6. I exited from the command line as root.

Then everything went back to normal. ^_________^

It's nothing big, really. But for me, it is. I remember Carl telling me something about the kill command. But I never really had to use it. At least, now I know. I learned it that hard way. But this is worth remembering for me. This is one difference between Linux and Windows that I have to get used to. No Task Manager for me when I am using Mandrake 10. But bash works perfectly fine. And quick too!

And I even IMed Carl this morning that I was feeling giggly about that first kill I made. ^_^ I think I am weird, giggly over just one kill. But he said that I was pretty normal. *giggles* Weird, I feel like I am blushing over this thing!

Must read bash commands. I need to learn the basics so I won't have to panic anymore(^0_0^)

-------------------------------
Linux newbies and non-Linux users: This is what I meant in the above written commands.

su
To log in as root, the SuperUser. The password is needed.
ps
Process status.
-e
This would select all the processes. I guess e stands for everything.
kill
This kills the process. Need I explain more?^_^
pid
The process ID. In the case of kill , this is the process of id of the process you want to kill.
exit
To logout.

posted by eClair @ 06:30