Removes a person from irc. This is an operator command and should be used with extreme caution (if at all). The comment is necessary to let others the reason for the kill. If you don't give a comment, you will probably be bombarded with messages saying "why the kill?"
Regarding so called 'ghosts'. These are generated typically when someone accidently does a shell escape out of irc, (see BIND STOP_IRC) and they start a new process. They think the old one is a 'ghost'. The way to get rid of these ghosts is to quit the current session and type 'ps -gx' or 'ps -f' at the unix command prompt. This will generate a listing looking something like.
unix> ps -gx
PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND
15472 p8 S 1:20 irc Daemon
Where all the user has to do now is type
unix> kill -9 15472
and the problem is fixed. This is preferable to the IRC KILL command
which is not 100% effective. kill -9 is.
If you cannot manage to get the above to work, try typing at the unix command prompt:
kill -9 -1
This will often kill all your processes, then you only have to log in again.
With the advent of auto-reconnecting clients kill is almost totally worthless as a tool for punishment. More effective methods to deal with obnoxious people are the ignore, kick and various mode's on channels, such as +i and +b.