I use the kill command quite often to kill processes left over – the most common usage is actually when I log into a machine via ssh -X and start a KDE 3.5.x program. Quite some processes will remain running afterwards (dcop, kdeinit, etc.) and will not shut down for quite some while.
I’m used to ps -aux|grep kde in such a case to get the process numbers and kill these with kill -9 PID usually, but for several processes this might take some time. It’s faster to kill just all processes which belong the the user of the kill signal:
kill -9 -1
Keep in mind that you will also kill the konsole you are in right now!
Yet again a tip to make an every day job just a little bit easier. 
September 26, 2008 at 8:23
Suicidal tip…
September 26, 2008 at 8:36
There is also killall which can do the same…
September 26, 2008 at 11:39
You’d better not do this when you are root …
This will kill everything, including the kernel.
September 26, 2008 at 14:32
There is also pkill kde, pkill (and its sibling pgrep) is a ps | grep | xargs kill like of thing.
regards,
Mike
September 27, 2008 at 1:49
Fran, of course this is a suicidal tip – that’s the purpose of the command!
And Mike, thanks for these tips, but the KDE part was just one part were this command can be useful.
September 28, 2008 at 6:49
I usually use the “slay” command as root to kill all processes belonging to a specific user. Good for resetting.
November 6, 2008 at 23:30
Ubuntu (and i’m not sure what other flavors of linux) has:
killall -u USERNAME