Killing a tree of processes in top/htop

htopkilltop

htop allows me to nicely see trees of processes within the shell. I can kill processes by pressing F9 (KILL) and then selecting which signal (e.g. 15 SIGTERM) I want to send to a job to kill.

However, this only allows me to kill one process at a time. Is there a way to kill a full tree of processes using htop?

Best Answer

From man htop:

INTERACTIVE COMMANDS

Space Tag or untag a process. Commands that can operate on multiple processes, like "kill", will then apply over the list of tagged processes, instead of the currently highlighted one.

U Untag all processes (remove all tags added with the Space key).

F9, k "Kill" process: sends a signal which is selected in a menu, to one or a group of processes. If processes were tagged, sends the signal to all tagged processes. If none is tagged, sends to the currently selected process.

Not quite the answer you were looking for, but close. You can also eliminate process groups or children with kill, see:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/392022/best-way-to-kill-all-child-processes

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Shell – killing processes automatically

Of course the one liner you wrote won't work since the $1 is inside the quotes. Try this:

ps| gawk '{ if ($4 != "COMMAND" && $4 != "sh" && $4 != "ps") system("kill -KILL "$1) }'

Have fun but use it with caution. I generally don't like system commands in gawk, certainly not the "kill" command.

Processes do not respond to the signals

Recent versions of the nVidia proprietary drivers (possibly combined with other recent versions of libraries) have a bug which causes them to corrupt the signal mask.

You can look at signal masks like this:

anthony@Zia:~$ ps -eo blocked,pid,cmd | egrep -v '^0+ '
         BLOCKED   PID CMD
fffffffe7ffbfeff   605 udevd --daemon
0000000000000002  4052 /usr/lib/policykit-1/polkitd --no-debug
0000000000087007  4646 /usr/sbin/mysqld --basedir=/usr […]
0000000000010000 15508 bash

That's about what it should look like. If you run that on a system with the proprietary nVidia drivers, you'll see all kinds of crazy values for BLOCKED, for many of your programs—including, likely, all the misbehaving ones.

Note that signal masks are passed from parent to child through fork/exec, so once a parent process has a corrupt one, all the children it spawns from that point forward will, too.

See also my question After upgrade, X button in titlebar no longer closes xterm and various distro bugs you'll be able to find now, knowing which package to look at. You can modify the code in my answer to that question to reset the signal mask to none blocked (Elide sigaddset and change SIG_UNBLOCK to SIG_SETMASK).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell – killing processes automatically

Processes do not respond to the signals

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