Ubuntu – “kill ” not really killing the process, why

command lineprocess

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    00:00:00 bash
 2200 pts/0    00:00:00 top
 2202 pts/0    00:00:00 top
 2258 pts/0    00:00:00 ps
x@xxx:/etc/grub.d$ fg
top

x@xxx:/etc/grub.d$ ps
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 1723 pts/0    00:00:00 bash
 2200 pts/0    00:00:00 top
 2620 pts/0    00:00:00 ps
x@xxx:/etc/grub.d$ fg
top

x@xxx:/etc/grub.d$ ps
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 1723 pts/0    00:00:00 bash
 2621 pts/0    00:00:00 ps

Best Answer

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
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