How do I automate killing a job in cron? [duplicate] - github

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Find and kill a process in one line using bash and regex
(30 answers)
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Sometimes when I try to start Firefox it says "a Firefox process is already running". So I have to do this:
jeremy#jeremy-desktop:~$ ps aux | grep firefox
jeremy 7451 25.0 27.4 170536 65680 ? Sl 22:39 1:18 /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.1/firefox
jeremy 7578 0.0 0.3 3004 768 pts/0 S+ 22:44 0:00 grep firefox
jeremy#jeremy-desktop:~$ kill 7451
What I'd like is a command that would do all that for me. It would take an input string and grep for it (or whatever) in the list of processes, and would kill all the processes in the output:
jeremy#jeremy-desktop:~$ killbyname firefox
I tried doing it in PHP but exec('ps aux') seems to only show processes that have been executed with exec() in the PHP script itself (so the only process it shows is itself.)

Answer 1

pkill firefox
More information: http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_pkill.htm

Answer 2

Also possible to use:
pkill -f "Process name"
For me, it worked up perfectly. It was what I have been looking for.
pkill doesn't work with name without the flag.
When -f is set, the full command line is used for pattern matching.

Answer 3

You can kill processes by name with killall <name>
killall sends a signal to all
processes running any of the specified
commands. If no signal name is
specified, SIGTERM is sent.
Signals can be specified either by
name (e.g. -HUP or -SIGHUP ) or by number (e.g.
-1) or by option -s.
If the command name is not regular
expression (option -r) and contains a
slash (/), processes executing that
particular file will be selected for
killing, independent of their name.
But if you don't see the process with ps aux, you probably won't have the right to kill it ...

Answer 4

A bit longer alternative:
kill `pidof firefox`

Answer 5

The easiest way to do is first check you are getting right process IDs with:
pgrep -f [part_of_a_command]
If the result is as expected. Go with:
pkill -f [part_of_a_command]
If processes get stuck and are unable to accomplish the request you can use kill.
kill -9 $(pgrep -f [part_of_a_command])
If you want to be on the safe side and only terminate processes that you initially started add -u along with your username
pkill -f [part_of_a_command] -u [username]

Answer 6

Kill all processes having snippet in startup path. You can kill all apps started from some directory by for putting /directory/ as a snippet. This is quite usefull when you start several components for the same application from the same app directory.
ps ax | grep <snippet> | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill
* I would prefer pgrep if available

Answer 7

Strange, but I haven't seen the solution like this:
kill -9 `pidof firefox`
it can also kill multiple processes (multiple pids) like:
kill -9 `pgrep firefox`
I prefer pidof since it has single line output:
> pgrep firefox
6316
6565
> pidof firefox
6565 6316

Answer 8

Using killall command:
killall processname
Use -9 or -KILL to forcefully kill the program (the options are similar to the kill command).

Answer 9

On Mac I could not find the pgrep and pkill neither was killall working so wrote a simple one liner script:-
export pid=`ps | grep process_name | awk 'NR==1{print $1}' | cut -d' ' -f1`;kill $pid
If there's an easier way of doing this then please share.

Answer 10

To kill with grep:
kill -9 `pgrep myprocess`

Answer 11

more correct would be:
export pid=`ps aux | grep process_name | awk 'NR==1{print $2}' | cut -d' ' -f1`;kill -9 $pid

Answer 12

I normally use the killall command.
Check this link for details of this command.

Answer 13

I was asking myself the same question but the problem with the current answers is that they don't safe check the processes to be killed so... it could lead to terrible mistakes :)... especially if several processes matches the pattern.
As a disclaimer, I'm not a sh pro and there is certainly room for improvement.
So I wrote a little sh script :
#!/bin/sh
killables=$(ps aux | grep $1 | grep -v mykill | grep -v grep)
if [ ! "${killables}" = "" ]
then
echo "You are going to kill some process:"
echo "${killables}"
else
echo "No process with the pattern $1 found."
return
fi
echo -n "Is it ok?(Y/N)"
read input
if [ "$input" = "Y" ]
then
for pid in $(echo "${killables}" | awk '{print $2}')
do
echo killing $pid "..."
kill $pid
echo $pid killed
done
fi

Answer 14

kill -9 $(ps aux | grep -e myprocessname| awk '{ print $2 }')

Answer 15

If you run GNOME, you can use the system monitor (System->Administration->System Monitor) to kill processes as you would under Windows. KDE will have something similar.

Answer 16

The default kill command accepts command names as an alternative to PID. See kill (1). An often occurring trouble is that bash provides its own kill which accepts job numbers, like kill %1, but not command names. This hinders the default command. If the former functionality is more useful to you than the latter, you can disable the bash version by calling
enable -n kill
For more info see kill and enable entries in bash (1).

Answer 17

ps aux | grep processname | cut -d' ' -f7 | xargs kill -9 $

Answer 18

awk oneliner, which parses the header of ps output, so you don't need to care about column numbers (but column names). Support regex. For example, to kill all processes, which executable name (without path) contains word "firefox" try
ps -fe | awk 'NR==1{for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) {if ($i=="COMMAND") Ncmd=i; else if ($i=="PID") Npid=i} if (!Ncmd || !Npid) {print "wrong or no header" > "/dev/stderr"; exit} }$Ncmd~"/"name"$"{print "killing "$Ncmd" with PID " $Npid; system("kill "$Npid)}' name=.*firefox.*