Bash Shell Awesomeness - Mass Killing Processes (On Ubuntu)

http://www.skorks.com/2009/08/bash-shell-awesomeness-mass-killing-processes-on-ubuntu/

by askorkin • 17 years ago

9 15 17 years ago

skorks.com

jgrahamc3• 17 years ago

You could just use killall.

http://linux.die.net/man/1/killall

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

Hey, You're right! Never noticed that -u option.

I must use killall 100 times a day :)

jgrahamc3• 17 years ago

Or you could ask ps to do most of the work for you:

  ps -u www-data -o pid --no-headers

That gives me just the PIDs of the processes run by www-data.

ap• 17 years ago

... or use pkill:

  pkill -9 -U lusername

Unlike in Linux, in most unices killall(1) terminates all the processes

yan• 17 years ago

God, that brings back memories of administrating Solaris boxes in high school. Once you reboot a primary web server twice, you never do it again.

lucumo• 17 years ago

> Unlike in Linux, in most unices killall(1) terminates all the processes

Hehe... That reminds me of the day I learned that you shouldn't put . in your path, especially in the front.

It turns out that (old?) Red Hat machines had a script 'killall' in their /etc/init.d ...

ilyak2• 17 years ago

He should really use awk instead of cut. or killall and for awesomeness, he should use zsh. bash is what you use for mediocrity.

xelfer• 17 years ago

Why awk instead of cut?

ilyak2• 17 years ago

awk treats input as lines and columns, therefore it would be more accurate than cut that treats input as lines and characters.

You don't want charaters this to that, what you do want is column 2.

ajross• 17 years ago

Who modded that down? He really should be using awk instead of cut. It has better readability: "{print $2}" to print the second field vs. a set of magic numbers denoting a character field. It's vastly easier to write (again, the "second field" is intuitive). It's also more generally useful, meaning that it's a better tool to know; cut is very primitive.

That said, there are better ways still to solve this problem. Some of them were detailed above. One that wasn't was the fact that GNU ps has lots of filtering options itself, in this case:

  ps -eo pid -U 1002

Does the work of the grep and cut from the original for you.

ja27• 17 years ago

su to that user and "kill 0" or safer "kill -1".

Bash Shell Awesomeness - Mass Killing Processes (On Ubuntu)

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