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I have some weird Skype crashes today. If I try to close it via the X nothing happens. I tried to kill the process over the KDE Process Manager (Ctrl + ESC).

I even tried to kill Skype via the terminal:

killall skype
kill (skypes process number)

None of the both worked. Right now I got to relogin to get it working again, and it keeps crashing every 15mins. I'm using KDE 4.7 and Ubuntu 11.10.

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4 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

These days killall will also let you pass in a signal (to save you needing to look up a PID):

killall -9 skype
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use this :

kill -9 $(pgrep skype)

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Instead of looking for the pid, use kill -9 $(pgrep skype). –  Brian Graham Dec 31 '11 at 22:39
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To kill a process/application in a Terminal type

$ ps -e | grep skype

this will show the skype process ID

e.g, it shows,

2338 ?        00:00:33 skype


$ kill 2338

in GUI configure a short cut key for xKill, (like I have configured to Ctrl + Alt + Bkspace) once you will press the combination, you will get a small cross symbol X instead of mouse cursor .... select the application window with that cross cursor with mouse and it will kill that application.

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man there are much faster ways. these aren't 90s anymore :D –  ubuntico Oct 30 '13 at 10:58
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kill -9 `ps -ef |grep skype | awk {print'$2'}`


  1. ps -ef lists all proccess .

  2. grep skype filters only skype proccess

  3. awk {print'$2'} retrieves the 2nd column of output which is PID

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