Excellent Utilities: fkill – kill processes quick and easy

Last Updated on May 22, 2022

In Operation

Starting fkill is just a matter of typing the command fkill at a shell.

fkill offers an interactive way of showing and managing the running processes. This mode is invoked fkill without arguments.

Here’s a recording of a terminal session of the interactive method in action. Purely for illustration, I’m ending the process belonging to Tauon Music Box, an excellent music player.

You can see me manually scrolling through the list, until I come to the process in question. Pressing Enter terminates the selected process.

The list shows the process ID, and where relevant the port.

There’s an even easier way to find a process in question. Just start typing the name of the process, and the software applies a filter, narrowing down the number of processes as you type.

The filtering functionality doesn’t implement fuzzy searching though. This means that no entries will show if I transpose characters of the search term, or omit a letter. That’s a shame.

There’s an alternative to the interactive method. Let’s say RStudio becomes unresponsive. I can issue the command at the shell:

$ fkill RStudio

And RStudio is terminated. Quick and easy. No need to scroll through a list of processes, even with filtering.

fkill supports process name and process ID as arguments. So if an application hangs, you don’t need to look up the relevant process ID (with a separate utility such as ps, top, gtop, ….). And it requires a little experience to interpret the output of ps/top/gtop. I’ve killed the wrong process in error occasionally. Sometimes this is because I’ve misread the process ID (PID), or it’s not actually clear what PID needs to be terminated. With fkill things are a bit simpler.

If you prefer the more traditional way of killing processes, you can still terminate a process once you’ve determined its PID. In this way, the software is functionally the same as kill.

You can also kill a port by prefixing it with a colon. Port 8080 is typically used for a personally hosted web server. If you want to kill that port, just type:

$ fkill :8080

If that port is not open, you’ll receive the error message “Couldn’t find a process with port ‘8080’”.

Next page: Page 3 – Other Features

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Other Features
Page 4 – Summary

Complete list of articles in this series: