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Find and kill a process in one line using bash and regex
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Closed 1 year ago.
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.)
pkill firefox
More information: http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_pkill.htm
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.
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 ...
A bit longer alternative:
kill `pidof firefox`
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]
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
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
Using killall command:
killall processname
Use -9 or -KILL to forcefully kill the program (the options are similar to the kill command).
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.
To kill with grep:
kill -9 `pgrep myprocess`
more correct would be:
export pid=`ps aux | grep process_name | awk 'NR==1{print $2}' | cut -d' ' -f1`;kill -9 $pid
I normally use the killall command.
Check this link for details of this command.
I was asking myself the same question but the problem with the current answers is that they don't safe check the processes to be killed so... it could lead to terrible mistakes :)... especially if several processes matches the pattern.
As a disclaimer, I'm not a sh pro and there is certainly room for improvement.
So I wrote a little sh script :
#!/bin/sh
killables=$(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
kill -9 $(ps aux | grep -e myprocessname| awk '{ print $2 }')
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.
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).
ps aux | grep processname | cut -d' ' -f7 | xargs kill -9 $
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.*
We have configures our stunnel properly in Ubuntu 16.04 , also it is starting properly we are getting our data in application which comes from stunnel server. Although I cannot find any proper way to stop stunnel. I tried killing the pid of stunnel , but killing pid is not a proper way to stop.
Thanks
There are could be several of stunnel processes:
[root#someserver ~]# ps aux | grep stunnel | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'
13527
13528
13529
13530
13531
13532
The following bash-one-line loop could handle to kill them all:
if kill $(ps aux | grep stunnel | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'); then echo "Done"; else echo "No ps left"; fi
Killing the PID sounds pretty bad, but it is the common way to stop processes in linux. "Kill" is just another name for "send signal". If you issue a kill $pid, then a SIGTERM is sent to that process.
The process can then handle the signal and perform a clean shutdown. This is also the way many programs implement a configuration reloading functionality, they often use SIGHUP for that (kill -SIGHUP $pid).
So, as long as you don't use kill -SIGKILL $pid (or in short: kill -9 $pid) the program can handle that signal and gracefully shutdown.
More about signals on linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(IPC)#List_of_signals
Using supervisord, how do I execute a command before running the program?
For example in the code below, I want a file to be created before starting the program. In the code below I am using tail -f /dev/null to simulate the background process but this could be any running program like '/path/to/application'.
I tried '&&' and this doesn't seem to work. The requirement is that the file has to be created first in order for the application to work.
[supervisord]
nodaemon=true
logfile=~/supervisord.log
[program:app]
command:touch ~a.c && tail -f /dev/null
The problem is that supervisor isn't running a shell to interpret command sections, so "&&" is just one of 5 space separated arguments it is passing to the touch command; if this ran successfully, then there should be some unusual filenames in its working directory now.
You can use a shell as your command and pass it the shell logic you would like:
command=/bin/sh -c "touch ~a.c && tail -f /dev/null"
Usually, this type of shell wrapper should be the interface provided and managed by the app and is what supervisord and others just know how to call with paths and options, i.e.:
command=myappswrapper.sh ~a.c
(where myappswrapper.sh is:)
#!/bin/sh
touch $1 && tail -f /dev/null
Here is a trick.
You use a shell script to do that and beyond that
[program:app]
command:sh /path/to/your/script.sh
It's can your script.sh
touch ~a.c
exec tail -f /dev/null
notice exec
I've written a shell script to soft-restart HAProxy (reverse proxy). Executing the script from the shell works. But I want a daemon to execute the script. That doesn't work. system() returns 256. I have no clue what that might mean.
#!/bin/sh
# save previous state
mv /home/haproxy/haproxy.cfg /home/haproxy/haproxy.cfg.old
mv /var/run/haproxy.pid /var/run/haproxy.pid.old
cp /tmp/haproxy.cfg.new /home/haproxy/haproxy.cfg
kill -TTOU $(cat /var/run/haproxy.pid.old)
if haproxy -p /var/run/haproxy.pid -f /home/haproxy/haproxy.cfg; then
kill -USR1 $(cat /var/run/haproxy.pid.old)
rm -f /var/run/haproxy.pid.old
exit 1
else
kill -TTIN $(cat /var/run/haproxy.pid.old)
rm -f /var/run/haproxy.pid
mv /var/run/haproxy.pid.old /var/run/haproxy.pid
mv /home/haproxy/haproxy.cfg /home/haproxy/haproxy.cfg.err
mv /home/haproxy/haproxy.cfg.old /home/haproxy/haproxy.cfg
exit 0
fi
HAProxy is executed with user haproxy. My daemon has it's own user too. Both run with sudo.
Any hints?
According to this and that, Perl's system() returns exit values multiplied by 256. So it's actually exiting with 1. It seems this happens in C too.
Unless system returns -1 its return value is of the same format as the status value from the wait family of system calls (man 2 wait). There are macros to help you interpret this status:
man 3 wait
Lists these macros and what they tell you.
A code of 256 probably means that the system command cannot locate the binary to run it. Remember that it may not be calling bash and that it may not have paths setup. Try again with full paths to the binaries!
I have the same problem when call script that contains `kill' command in a daemon.
The daemon must have closed the stdout, stderr...
Use something like system("scrips.sh > /dev/null") should work.
I have the following situation:
A perl script read a file where a application wrote it's pid, and tries to kill it.
But the problem is that I don't want to kill another process so I check if current process with the recorded PID has the same command line. If so, the application could be killed.
The following blues script find out the cmdline:
$PIDCMDLINE = `ps -p $PID -o cmd`;
The problem is that if another instance for another user is up, maybe on the same sid, it would be killed because it will return a valid command line, and I don't want that behaviour.
How can I restrict ps -p to search only current users processes (no, simple ps doesn't count, because -p nullify the default effect of ps)
Thank you!
You can use the following to check both command and user for the certain PID:
ps -p <PID> -o user,cmd --columns 1000 | grep `whoami`
Adding a 'grep' according to the comment.
May be a little awkward, but what about this:
$PIDCMDLINE = ps -p $PID -o user,command | grep `whoami` | awk '{ print $2 }'