How to kill a unresponsive program from terminal?

Solution 1:

You should be able to use:

pkill totem

A generally helpful thing to find which processes are hogging the CPU is top: then you can press k and type in the PID of the process, and then press Enter twice to kill it;

Another program that can do this is htop: This can also system resources being used, and processes can be killed by selecting them, pressing k, and then pressing Enter. Parent processes can also be found by pressing t to toggle tree view.

Solution 2:

Easiest method:

killall totem

As is says: this will kill -all- instances named totem.

Alternative:

ps -ef |grep totem
rinzwind  3601  2236 14 21:05 ?        00:00:00 totem

and then kill the process

kill -9 3601

If totem is started as another user you will need sudo.

Solution 3:

You can also use pstree -ps command to get a complete (tree-)list of running processes with sub-processes, like this:

    ├─mission-control(1689)  
    ├─modem-manager(912)  
    ├─mpd(1908)─┬─{mpd}(1909)  
    │           ├─{mpd}(1910)  
    │           ├─{mpd}(1911)  
    │           ├─{mpd}(1912)  
    │           └─{mpd}(1913)  
    ├─nmbd(1858)  
    ├─obex-data-serve(1652)

Then use terminals' search function cmd+shift+f to seek out the process in question, for instance; mpd followed by this command:

kill -9 1908