Why kill a process? Don’t even the smallest processes deserve to live?
In a word, no. Sometimes a program hangs, and your computer just sits there, inert. Or sometimes a program gets stuck in some kind of loop and never ends. Or sometimes you give the wrong command and realize that you don’t want to run that program after all. To stop the process in which the program is running, you kill the process.
Suppose that you’re running along, minding your own business, and you find that you have a program that just won’t stop. Vell, ve haff vays to make eet stop. First, we discuss the normal ways to kill a process, and then we get into some serious artillery.