How do I force kill Emacs?

Question

I often find myself with an incomplete or invalid emacs config, which breaks the normal behavior of kill-emacs such that it stops at an error.

In this case, I would like to forcefully kill emacs, without resorting to hunting down the PID and issuing a kill from the shell. Can I do this in pure Emacs Lisp?

Answer 1

You can try setting kill-emacs-hook to nil before calling kill-emacs:

(defun really-kill-emacs ()
  "Like `kill-emacs', but ignores `kill-emacs-hook'."
  (interactive)
  (let (kill-emacs-hook)
    (kill-emacs)))

Alternatively, you can get Emacs's PID using emacs-pid and make it commit suicide by calling call-process with "kill -9":

(defun brutally-kill-emacs ()
  "Use `call-process' to send ourselves a KILL signal."
  (interactive)
  (call-process "kill" nil nil nil "-9" (number-to-string (emacs-pid))))

Answer 2

Sometimes, I end up with several unreachable emacs processes laying around. My emacsclient normally automatically starts an emacs and calls server-start--I guess there is some bug in my configuration somewhere which results in this happening more than once.

I kill the extra emacsen with killall emacs in a shell. So far, -9 hasn't been needed. (It works when there's only one emacs running, too, and I don't have to hunt down a pid!)

Answer 3

This will force kill emacs daemon from bash. If there is no emacs running and when we run emacsclient -e "(kill-emacs)", which starts emacs and kills it again. I just added simple if/else to prevent that.

• Instead of kill-emacs you can use brutally-kill-emacs () that is defined in @Constantine's answer.

#!/bin/bash

num=$(ps aux | grep -E "[e]macs --daemon" | wc -l)
if [ $num -ge 1 ]; then
    emacsclient -e "(brutally-kill-emacs)" > /dev/null 2>&1

    # following commands guarantees 
    kill -9 $(ps aux | grep -E "emacs"      | awk '{print $2}')
    (killall emacs) > /dev/null 2>&1
    (killall emacsclient) > /dev/null 2>&1
    kill -9 $(ps aux | grep -E "[e]macs" | awk '{print $2}') > /dev/null 2>&1
else
    echo "emacs is already killed."
fi


----

If you are a m

Sometimes following zombie process remain opened and consumes all the memory so `kill -9 $(ps aux | grep -E "emacs" | awk '{print $2}')` will be your friend.

alper 4785 100.0 0.0 4461068 7860 ?? R 1:27AM 41:42.43 /usr/local/Cellar/emacs-head@26/26.3_1/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -Q -l /Users/alper/.emacs.d/elpa/async-20200809.501/async.elc -batch -f async-batch-invoke