UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I was looking at previews of XScreenSaver and the desktop froze. I am unsure how to restart the FVWM. I downloaded putty and can connect via ssh. I tried to shut the machine down by using the "shutdown -h now" command , but it will not power off.

If I knew the process number I could kill it. I am looking for a way to restart the GUI or the process number to kill XScreenSaver.

Any help is greatly appriciated.

I don't think I have ever seen `shutdown -h now` ever actually powerdown an x86 system before. It just drops the machine to the "hit any key to reboot" message after shutting the OS down.

To kill XScreenSaver you need to find the pid of XScreenSaver.

This can be done with `ps` and `grep`.

Example:

Code:

FreeBSD:joeuser:/home/joeuser $ ps -aux | grep -i "xscreensaver"
joeuser      914  0.0  1.1  3636 2664  ??  I     9:46PM   0:01.52 xscreensaver -nos

I now know that the pid of xscreensaver on my machine is 914 and can issue a kill statement like this:

Code:

kill 914

If xscreensaver is still stubborn, you can use the -9 option of kill (which you should only use after several attempts of the normal kill command):

Code:

kill -9 914

And hopefully that will take care of the xscreensaver problem.