How kill cp in Linux?

Question

I see in:

ps aux 

that exists process like:

cp  file.txt /home/file.txt

This file is very big.

I try to kill like:

kill -9 12345

12345 is pid. But without success. What else I can do? What the reason?

P.S. 12345 0.0 0.0 7890 704 ? D 14:42 0:05 cp

Answer 1

You can't kill process if it waits for some kernel syscall. For example if drive is busy or filesystem is otherwise locked up then you can't kill this process. How does your process look like if you do "ps -l". WCHAN and STAT are attributes you need to look at.

Answer 2

Just try CTRL+C in the terminal which cp works in. (I've assumed that you didn't send cp to background, which I don't do often.)