Linux – How to Kill Multiple Instances of a Running Process

killprocess

Suppose I have a thousand or more instances of any process (for example, vi) running. How do I kill them all in one single shot/one line command/one command?

Best Answer

What's wrong with the good old,

for pid in $(ps -ef | grep "some search" | awk '{print $2}'); do kill -9 $pid; done

There are ways to make that more efficient,

for pid in $(ps -ef | awk '/some search/ {print $2}'); do kill -9 $pid; done

and other variations, but at the basic level, it's always worked for me.

Related Solutions

Shell – How to kill two or more processes with one kill command

First of all, check out pkill. You can kill off any number of process given their name:

pkill java

You can even use the full command with arguments as part of the search

pkill -f some_string_in_arguemnts

Secondly, your construct with xargs will work just fine for multiple PID's as long as they are piped in as either space or newline separated numbers.

Graceful way to kill process

Try to use pkill selenium if neither this, nor one of the others work you can keep using your method with another pipe sequence such as

kill `ps -ef|grep -i selenium| grep -v grep| awk '{print $2}'`

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell – How to kill two or more processes with one kill command

Graceful way to kill process

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