Ubuntu – How to start a process with a different name

killprocess

Basically I want to dynamically start some processes which may create their own children processes, also I want to kill a certain group of processes I just created whenever I want.

One way I could think of is to start processes with a name (to distinguish as a group), then use pkill to kill them by the name.

The question is how to start a process with a name so that I can use pkill to kill them by the name? I am open to other solutions as well.

Best Answer

You can use the exec shell builtin:

bash -c "exec -a MyUniqueProcessName <command> &"

<command> replaces the current shell, no new process is created, that's why I'm starting a new shell to call exec.

Then you can kill the process with:

pkill -f MyUniqueProcessName

You can start more than one process under the same name, then pkill -f <name> will kill all of them.

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Java Processes – How to Kill Java Processes

A few more pipes will get you where you want to be. Here's how I'd do it:

search_terms='whatever will help find the specific process' 

kill $(ps aux | grep "$search_terms" | grep -v 'grep' | awk '{print $2}')

Here's what's happening:

grep -v 'grep' excludes the grep process from the the results.

awk '{print $2}' prints only the 2nd column of the output (in this case the PID)

$(...) is command substitution. Basically the result from the inner command will be used as an argument to kill

This has the benefit of finer control over what is killed. For example, if you're on a shared system you can edit the search terms so that it only attempts to kill your own java processes.

Best Answer

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