Desktop like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXDE have a task manager that allows you to terminate a process using the graphical interface, but not always we have managers like these or we simply work without graphical interface (server) and we need to kill a particular process because it does not respond to any action, and that's when should lend hands to the console
To end a process we can use the command kill and pkill, kill requires the ID of the process while pkill requires a name or pattern
Examples
$ kill -9 25252 $ pkill firefox
Further reading
- man kill
- man pkill