What is the appropriate command to forcefully kill a process?

The command to forcefully kill a process is sigkill, which corresponds to sending the SIGKILL signal to a process in a Unix-like operating system. The SIGKILL signal is a powerful signal that cannot be caught or ignored by the process, which means it is used when a process must be terminated immediately and cannot be allowed to perform any cleanup tasks. When a process receives SIGKILL, the operating system will stop it without giving it a chance to handle the signal, ensuring that the process is definitively and promptly terminated.

This command is particularly useful in situations where a process is unresponsive or when a graceful termination is not suitable. It is important to use this command judiciously since forcibly killing a process can lead to loss of unsaved data or corruption of files if the process was in the middle of a critical write operation.

In comparison, the other signals do not serve the purpose of forcefully terminating a process. For example, SIGINT (which can be used to interrupt a process) and SIGTERM (which is used for a polite request to terminate) allow the target process to catch the signal and execute any cleanup actions before exiting. SIGTSTP, on the other hand, is used to stop a process