How to break out of a program in an infinite loop?

Question

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)

Answer 1

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).

Answer 2

You'll have to kill the program using Ctrl + C where C stands for Cancel.

Answer 3

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 &.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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...

Answer 7

You can press Ctrl + C.