KILL Linux processes!! (also manage them) // Linux for Hackers // EP 7

About this video

Episode 7 of the Linux for Hackers series, run in a free Hack The Box Academy browser lab, is a hands-on tour of finding, monitoring, moving and killing Linux processes. Chuck starts with ps: plain ps only shows the current terminal’s processes, so he uses ps -u with a username piped through grep to find Firefox, and ps aux to list all users’ processes including those not started from that terminal. He shows top and the prettier htop for live monitoring sorted by CPU and memory use, quitting each with Q. Using ping -c 100 to networkchuck.com and sleep 30 as examples, he explains foreground processes that block the terminal, then demonstrates job control: Ctrl-Z suspends a job, jobs lists it, bg resumes it in the background where Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Z no longer stop it, fg brings it back to the foreground, and appending an ampersand starts a process directly in the background. Finally he covers killing properly: pgrep finds a process ID by name, kill sends signals listed by kill -l, the default signal 15 SIGTERM merely asks a process to die, Ctrl-C is signal 2 SIGINT, Ctrl-Z is signal 19 SIGSTOP with 18 SIGCONT to continue, signal 9 SIGKILL forces termination, and pkill -9 by name kills every matching process at once.

Key takeaways

• Use ps aux (or ps -u piped to grep) to find processes beyond the current terminal, and pgrep to get a process ID directly by name
• top and htop monitor running processes live, sorted by CPU usage, and Q exits them
• Ctrl-Z suspends a foreground job; bg moves it to the background, fg returns it to the foreground, jobs lists jobs, and & starts a process in the background
• kill defaults to signal 15 SIGTERM, which a process can refuse; kill -9 (SIGKILL) forces it to die
• Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Z are kill-signal shortcuts — signal 2 SIGINT and signal 19 SIGSTOP respectively — and pkill kills all processes matching a name

Episode details: published December 17, 2021 · 21:51 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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