"kill <PID>" not really killing the process, why?

fixit_fiona

I am trying to improve my command line skills and I have encountered a problem where I cannot kill a process. I type kill 2200 where 2200 is my PID and the process is not killed. After few minutes wait is still in the top and ps aux . I have even tried typing it with sudo - no results. Any ideas why it would be like that ? EDIT I have found a weird dependency, where fg updates the processes list: x@xxx:/etc/grub.d$ ps PID TTY TIME CMD 1723 pts/0...

Originally asked by Patryk on Stack Exchange (askubuntu) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Processes can ignore some signals. If you send SIGKILL it will not be able to ignore it (and neither catch it to do cleanups). Try: kill -9 {PID} Learn more by reading the manual page: man kill

Full answer by Michał Šrajer: https://askubuntu.stackexchange.com/a/59814 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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