Reputation: 6807

How to kill all processes matching a name?

Say I want to kill every process containing the word amarok. I can print out the commands I want to execute. But how do I actually make the shell execute them. ie.

ps aux | grep -ie amarok | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}'
Output:
kill -9 3052
kill -9 3071
kill -9 3076
kill -9 3077
kill -9 3079
kill -9 3080
kill -9 3082
kill -9 3083
kill -9 3084
kill -9 3085
kill -9 3086
kill -9 3087
kill -9 3088
kill -9 3089
kill -9 4031

Upvotes: 344

Answers (11)

Victor Marrerp

Reputation: 185

try kill -s 9 `ps -ef |grep "Nov 11" |grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'` To kill processes of November 11 or kill -s 9 `ps -ef |grep amarok|grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'` To kill processes that contain the word amarok

Upvotes: 6

Tony O'Hagan

Reputation: 22692

If you're using cygwin or some minimal shell that lacks killall you can just use this script:

killall.sh - Kill by process name.

#/bin/bash
ps -W | grep "$1" | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill --

Usage:

$ killall <process name>

Upvotes: 1

vova7865

Reputation: 1

Maybe adding the commands to executable file, setting +x permission and then executing?

ps aux | grep -ie amarok | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}' > pk;chmod +x pk;./pk;rm pk

Upvotes: 0

user79878

Reputation: 845

pkill -x matches the process name exactly.

pkill -x amarok

pkill -f is similar but allows a regular expression pattern.

Note that pkill with no other parameters (e.g. -x, -f) will allow partial matches on process names. So "pkill amarok" would kill amarok, amarokBanana, bananaamarok, etc.

I wish -x was the default behavior!

Upvotes: 17

John Alexander Betts

Reputation: 5206

The safe way to do this is:

pkill -f amarok

Upvotes: 44

androidyue

Reputation: 1112

I think this command killall is exactly what you need. The command is described as "kill processes by name".It's easy to use.For example

killall chrome

This command will kill all process of Chrome.Here is a link about killall command

http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_killall.htm

Hope this command could help you.

Upvotes: 21

Nektarios

Reputation: 10371

ps aux | grep -ie amarok | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

xargs(1): xargs -- construct argument list(s) and execute utility. Helpful when you want to pipe in arguments to something like kill or ls or so on.

Upvotes: 276

Tim Bielawa

Reputation: 7095

From man 1 pkill

-f     The pattern is normally only matched against the process name.
       When -f is set, the full command line is used.

Which means, for example, if we see these lines in ps aux:

apache   24268  0.0  2.6 388152 27116 ?        S    Jun13   0:10 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   24272  0.0  2.6 387944 27104 ?        S    Jun13   0:09 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   24319  0.0  2.6 387884 27316 ?        S    Jun15   0:04 /usr/sbin/httpd

We can kill them all using the pkill -f option:

pkill -f httpd

Upvotes: 564

dandrews

Reputation: 3045

You can also evaluate your output as a sub-process, by surrounding everything with back ticks or with putting it inside $():

`ps aux | grep -ie amarok | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}'`

 $(ps aux | grep -ie amarok | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}')

Upvotes: 3

Chen Levy

Reputation: 16368

If you want to execute the output of a command, you can put it inside $(...), however for your specific task take a look at the killall and pkill commands.

Upvotes: 4

Eric Fortis

Reputation: 17350

use pgrep

kill -9 $(pgrep amarok)

Upvotes: 66

How to kill all processes matching a name?

Answers (11)

killall.sh - Kill by process name.

Usage:

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