When running a program that goes into an infinite loop in the terminal, how would I bring back the command prompt?
(I'm using Fedora core 5)
18 Answers
You could send a SIGHUP (Ctrl-Z) or SIGTERM (Ctrl-C). The former merely pauses the program, you may resume with fg (or resume as a background process, using bg).
You'll have to kill the program using Ctrl + C where C stands for Cancel.
Either Ctrl-C as mentioned, or if that should not work, open another terminal, find the process using ps -ef|grep , find the process ID (pid), and use the kill command: kill -9
Launch the program with & at the end to cause it run in the background. Note that if you exit the terminal, the application might/will stop as well.
root@root:~$ run_app with params &Using Ctrl+C will kill it if you forgot the &.
There is no way to prove that any arbitrary program will ever end without actually running it to the end.
Having said that, it is possible to set up a watchdog via e.g. D-Bus that can kill a program if a response is not received within a given amount of time.
As mentioned, you can simply add a & to the command line. You can also hit CTRL-Z (this puts the process in the Stopped state), and then type bg to get it running in the background again...
You can press Ctrl + C.
you can press ctrl + z type: ps ux ,to see the running process, if the one you want to kill is there
type: kill -9 processId , where the process id is the loop process id
