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Comment by dmarinus | Hacker News Reader

After decades of experience I learned to use ctrl-\ (break) or ctrl-z and then kill -9 %1. Hope this helps someone.

Which is exactly what the author is saying shouldn't be needed.

Author is talking about looking up PIDs, kill -9 %1 saves you from that.

It is true this improves the bad path. It ignores desired happy path cases: downstream processes, custom debugging, graceful shutdown, preserved workspaces, and so on.

It may not be %1; if the shell says

    [2]+  Stopped                 units

it's %2. But it's also %+, %%, and just %, which is what the "+" after the [2] means. In my case %1 is evince zhegalkin-sm7433.pdf (Running, not Stopped), which I definitely do not want to kill.

Plenty of people open a new terminal window for every new program they want to run, but I commonly have several "jobs" in the same window, stopped or even running. Less often now that monitors are bigger, but still.

Excellent advice, thanks for sharing. Would in turn recommend using CopyQ to store this tips (and other like it) as a pinned items in folder with explanations for use two years later, that's how I personally stay on top of terminal kung-fu without overloading the consciousness-in-meat*

* https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

I wouldn't call this excellent advice - kill -9 will rob the process of the opportunity to clean up after itself and leave everything in a good state (e.g. any binary files being manipulated by the application). So I would use this as a last resort - start with Ctrl+C and then "kill INT %1" and then "kill TERM %1" before "kill KILL %1".

(For those who don't know "kill KILL" is equivalent to "kill -9". And despite the name "kill" is a tool for sending signals to processes.)

Thanks for elaborating: the ctrl-c as first port of call was assumed obvious from my side but the:

" "kill INT %1" and then "kill TERM %1" before "kill KILL %1". "

is good advice as progressive measures

Kill9 can keep ports locked for a bit after exiting which is a quite annoying

Anything can keep ports locked for a bit (if either side doesn't properly close the connection). That's how TCP works. Set reuseaddr on your daemon's sockets.

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