Linux Process termination

Every so often you'll get a process that refuses end normally. The kill command will usually stop the program; it sends the process the TERM signal. The processes that don't catch this process will terminate. However, some processes do catch this signal because they probably want some exit code to executed before they exit. If they catch it, they are supposed to exit but if they're not running properly it may still refuse to exit. In this case you have to send Kill -9; this signal cannot be caught.

In some cases you may have to kill the parent because some processes replicate new children whenever the children are deleted. You can check the parent id of the process with ps -f. Then just execute a kill on that parent. Once the parent is killed all the children processes should be killed as well.