A quick way to stop or start a particular process running as a system daemon on your Ubuntu box is to make use of the start-stop-daemon command.
Usage is broken down into first providing a command, be it –start, –stop or –help, followed by a matching option which points it at what to throw that command at.
In terms of matching options available, you can search for a daemon based on –name (process name), –user (username|uid), –exec (matches executable file names) or –pidfile (pid-file match).
So for example, should you wish to stop your subversion daemon, simply enter
start-stop-daemon --stop --name svnserve
Nifty.
Related Link: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man8/start-stop-daemon.8.html