Like any operating system, a Linux machine is always running lots of programs. Some are essential for the operating system to run, others are invoked by users. These programs are known as ?processes. A process normally ends when a program is closed or not needed.
However, sometimes a process can get ‘stuck’, potentially consuming globs of RAM and/or CPU cycles. If this happens, it’s best to manually ???kill??? the process. The Linux operating system comes supplied with a utility that deals with this situation. It’s called kill, one of numerous essential utilities shipped with util-linux, a standard package distributed as part of Linux. One thing a newcomer to Linux learns quickly is that they’re never limited to a single way of performing a task. And killing processes is no exception. In this article, we’ll look at an alternative to kill. It’s called fkill. It’s billed as offering a quicker and easier way to terminating processes.