I occasionally use the killall
command to kill processes. The reason why I say ocassionally is that in some cases it hasn't worked for me.
A recent example was with thunderbird where there were about 5 instances in memory so I decided to use the killall
command. It killed 2 processes and 3 were still left in memory. Tried again and the 3 were still there.
So I manually used the kill -9
command to kill each of the individual processes via their pids. That worked.
I mostly use the kill -9
command as it works. The killall
command has let me down so many times I just don't bother using it. But there must be a reason why it doesn't work. Am I using it wrong?
I know there are other commands like pkill
but I would be grateful to understand why the killall
command doesn't work as expected. I have even tried to kill just one process and it is a hit and miss affair. But the kill -9
command works every time.
Any ideas?
PS: sudo
doesn't make a difference