Actually, I've written this post before (quite a few months ago) but then deleted it because it didn't work. In the mean time, I found out why, so I decided to post it again.

slay is a command line utility used for killing all the processes used by a particular User. Some users will leave with out logingout, some kid users will use heavy games and stay it in background. slay will kill all the processes for such conditions.

One of the best features in Linux is the way you can control processes from the command line, so if you have an application that locks up your GUI, you can always SSH over from another machine and just kill the offending process.

A true wizard doesn’t just run processes, a true wizard knows how to communicate with those processes through signals to stop, restart, and even kill processes. This may sound like arcane and obscure knowledge, but if you follow along, you’ll be managing your processes like an adept in no time.

In Windows, when your system hangs, you can always press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, wait for the Task Manager to open, and kill the process that doesn’t respond. However, Ctrl-Alt-Delete don’t always work the way you want it to leaving you no other option but to do a hard-reset, and perhaps as a result corrupt your data kissing your important files goodbye.

htop is an improved version of top, a complex process viewer which allows to visualize processes in real time, see memory and CPU consumption, send signals to processes, renice processes, and sort them by various options. It makes use of colors and you can also scroll horizontally and vertically to see the full names of the running processes.

If you have a process ID but aren't sure whether it's valid, you can use the most unlikely of candidates to test it: the kill command.

The PSMon utility lets you specify which processes should be running, how much of resources such as CPU or RAM each is allowed to use when it runs, and how many instances are able to be run. PSMon will then ensure that these processes are running and kill off a process if it starts to use too many resources, and possibly restart a process if it has crashed.

Qps Visual Process Manager is an X11 version of “top” or “ps” that displays processes in a window and lets you sort and manipulate them. It displays some general system information, and many details about current processes (such as the TCP/UDP sockets in use by a process). Qps runs on Linux and Solaris.