To terminate an unresponsive process immediately without waiting for a graceful shutdown, the administrator can use the command kill -SIGKILL 5545 (A). This will send a signal to the process with the PID 5545 that cannot be ignored or handled by the process, and force it to stop. The other commands will send different signals that may allow the process to perform some cleanup or termination actions, or may be ignored by the process. References:
* [CompTIA Linux+ Study Guide], Chapter 6: Managing Processes, Section: Killing Processes
* [How to Kill Processes in Linux]