Today's article is fairly generic and should apply to most any Linux user...

[KGIII]

Have you ever needed to know an application's process ID (PID)? Well, even if you haven't, there are some good reasons why you might want to have that information available. Linux makes that information available, of course. In fact, there are all sorts of ways to find a PID.

Find An Application's Process ID (PID) • Linux Tips

Linux Tips helps you get your Linux skills up to speed, by making Linux approachable.

linux-tips.us

Also, this article was mostly written so that I can reference it in a later article. I just need to remember to write said article in the future.

 

[BigBadBeef]

Once again, a well thought out guide - universal and approachable from many distributions... and an excellent way to scare a beginner away with syntax!

Here is my solution, only 3 clicks away (well this isn't exactly "mine" per se, its the one I personally have implemented):

Courtesy of gnome and its vitals plugin by corecoding. All pertinent information is at glance and in a much more visually appealing manner. You can ascertain the status of any process at a glance!

I'm sure the other desktop environments have their equally as intuitive counterparts, AMR?
I personally am so pleased with cosmic (a variant of gnome) that I slapped myself for the preposterous notion of merely thinking about other desktops, but I digress.

 

[KGIII]

and an excellent way to scare a beginner away with syntax!

LOL (I legit chuckled.) This one isn't nearly as complex as some of my other articles, like those trying to share how to use the 'find' command.

I'm sure the other desktop environments have their equally as intuitive counterparts, AMR?

In many, the system monitor will show PIDs. So, there's that. (And, I was nice enough to mention that one in the intro. I was feeling nice enough to show that one didn't really need a terminal at this point.)

So, I suppose that's similar to what you've got going on. I'm not actually quite sure what you have going on. I confess that I avoid GNOME as much as I can. I've tried to like it. I've tried to make friends with it. If absolutely needed, I can navigate through it, but that ends my usage. Oh, and I've had some fun playing with gnome-tweaks.

As for the rest, you can do it all in your keyboard in just a second or three. Well, maybe five to ten seconds.

Hmm... Let me test this?

I just opened a terminal and entered ps aux in less than five seconds, so there's that. (That's zero clicks... On a mouse.) Of course, I'm used to doing that sort of stuff. It'd take a few seconds longer to pipe it to grep and add the application's name.

The next article on this subject will be in the terminal. It might even require a terminal.

 

[BigBadBeef]

So, I suppose that's similar to what you've got going on. I'm not actually quite sure what you have going on.

This: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1460/vitals/

The rest is just typical PoP!_os cosmic gnome variant with a bit of cajoling to make it look fancy.

As for the rest, you can do it all in your keyboard in just a second or three. Well, maybe five to ten seconds.

More than enough time for a rookie to panic and run in the nearest corn field, hide for a few hours and mumble to himself about the big bad Linux community trying to make him do horrible things to his pc. For all he knows about code, you may be trying get him to consent his pc being to used as a proxy to hack the CIA.

The next article on this subject will be in the terminal. It might even require a terminal.

I'm sure I'll find some visual tool to butt in on that too!

 

[KGIII]

I'm sure I'll find some visual tool to butt in on that too!

Maybe? But I've never found one that offered proper granularity.

Though, it might be more accurate to say that I've never noticed such. Yeah, it's likely that I've just never noticed and that some tools already offer this.

I'll give you a hint about the next article... Well, probably not 'next', so I don't bore myself, but 'the second part of this article' would be a bit more accurate.

The next step is to use these PIDs to kill processes. First, you try it the nice way. If that doesn't work, you force the kernel to unload the process - and that works. (Though it may leave zombie processes.)

I've never noticed a GUI tool that let me pick between them.

But, yeah, surely such an option exists - but every distro has a nice handy terminal that comes installed by default.

Hmm... Now I kinda want a GUI tool that does that. Something that lets me pick between killall -9 and killall -15. (There are other values, but I only worry about those two on a regular basis.)

It shouldn't be too hard to write a tool to do that. Just pull the results from ps aux and then offer both (or more) in the right click menu as a way to kill the processes.

Surely someone's done that already and I just don't notice - 'cause I just use the terminal.

More than enough time for a rookie to panic and run in the nearest corn field, hide for a few hours and mumble to himself about the big bad Linux community trying to make him do horrible things to his pc.

I'm kinda shocked at how much traffic my site gets. Lately, I mostly just pay attention to the bandwidth costs and I'm using about 40 GB (which is quite a bit for a site like mine) of just CDN traffic. People are staying on the page for an average of about 3.5 minutes, which means they're reading it. I no longer bother with heat map tracking, as I've seen enough.

So, hopefully, I'm bringing people up to speed with Linux and they're learning as they go.

Hopefully... I get a ton of my traffic from people searching Google. So, there's that...

 

[BigBadBeef]

This is only a sign of good site optimization for google bot to rate it high on the search list.
I'll keep my eyes you for your next article.

Okay maybe not that much...

 

[KGIII]

This is only a sign of good site optimization for google bot to rate it high on the search list.

LOL Just that was a monumental task. Google hated my first site - but Bing loved it. The articles are written to a formula that appeals to Google,

Google loves this one. Bing refuses to index it - regardless of what I do. That kinda irked me, but then I just figured it was Bing and I can live without them.

Also, most of my high-ranking articles were pretty much accidental. Seriously, I get a ton of traffic for my 'screenfetch vs neofetch' article and I'm really not sure why.

 

[camtaf]

I'm guessing, kill, & kill -9.

 

[KGIII]

I'm guessing, kill, & kill -9.

Close. We'll be using 'killall' and the two we'll be covering (remember this is for people still taking baby steps) are -9 and -15. So, first we'll be asking nicely and, if that doesn't work, we'll just use a hammer.

 

[z7vl7abxc]

i hadn't seen or come across pgrep before. thanks for the introduction.

 

[KGIII]

i hadn't seen or come across pgrep before. thanks for the introduction.

Always a pleasure. It was in my notes but in a totally different section of notes that I found with the mighty CTRL + F function. I don't use it often enough, so I had to dig it out of my notes.

I really should have a better system - though I guess that's kinda what I'm building now.

 

[KGIII]

I'm guessing, kill, & kill -9.

Also, you're correct. That's what I ended up using in the article, largely because my memory is atrocious.