Murdering misbehaving applications with xkill

Have you ever had a window in Linux freeze on you and no matter how many times you tried to close it, it just wouldn’t go away? Then when you try and find the process in System Monitor (or the like) you can’t seem to identify it for whatever reason?

Thankfully there is a really easy to use command that lets you simply click on the offending window and POOF!… it goes away instantly. So how does it work? Let’s say you have a window that is frozen like this

As long as you can see it you can kill it!
As long as you can see it you can xkill it!

First open up a new terminal window and type the command

xkill

and hit Enter. This will then tell you to simply click on the window you want to kill:

Select the window whose client you wish to kill with button 1….

Next it is as simple as actually clicking on the frozen window and you can say goodbye to your problem. Happy xkill-ing 🙂

This post originally appeared on my website here.



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