A surprising amount of Linux users are unfamiliar with how to force quit programs via the command-line. It is often that your only option to escape a process gone awry is using the term window.

I was coding with some friends yesterday and to my surprise, they didn’t know how to quit an unresponsive process. I fear that this ignorance is widespread. The procedure is fairly simple. Use the following command to list ongoing processes:

ps x

After you’ve located the UID of the problem process (usually a 4 or 5-digit natural number), kill it.

Let’s say our UID is 27182.

kill -9 27182

Done!