The Linux kill command is used to kill PID’s or process ID’s. This command is beneficial for numerous reasons typically for run away processes, processes caught in some sort of loop, to kick users from a system, or any other number of reasons.

Typically kill is used in the below format with 12345 being the PID in this example.

[root@server ~]# kill 12345

If the process will not die from using the above command the -9 switch can be added to force it to stop as shown below.

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