How do I stop a currently running cron job executing wget?

Solution 1:

I think you killed /bin/sh which was the parent of wget you were after. You did not do anything to wget.

To kill wget with kill you need to find the PID of wget. ps fauxww | grep -A 2 '[C]RON' (or more than 2) could have shown you the right wget. Now it may be too late to find wget this way because as an orphaned process it was adopted by another process which may or may not match [C]RON.

Find the PID of wget with pidof wget or ps … | grep [w]get, not relying on its relation to CROND because the relation may be no more. In case of many wget processes you may need to investigate further to find the right PID among many. Then kill it.

Expect success, unless you target the wrong process again. Your previous attempt did not kill wget because you did not target wget at all.