pg_cancel_backend and pg_ctl kill

Hi -

I've been having some problems where we have a nightly script to
replicate data which fails because of an <IDLE in transaction> process.
I figured I should kill any of the processes before doing the
replication. I've read several of the posts about pg_cancel_backend and
from what I've read it looks like this won't kill IDLE processes. There
were several suggestions about shelling out & using kill, or writing a C
function.

What I'm wondering about is if pg_ctl kill [procpid] will do the job.
The doc seems to suggest this, but I'm wanted to check before bringing
my server to it's knees...

Running 8.2.4 on solaris 10.

Mija