Shell – Kill all processes related to an application

killlinuxprocessshell

I have two processes that are temporarily spawned and I need to kill them. Here are the processes from ps aux

david  38329   0.0  5.0  3916476 104624 s002  S    11:33AM   0:17.43 /Applications/Firefox.a
david  38319   0.0  0.0  2442472   1028 s002  S    11:33AM   0:00.10 Xvfb -br -screen 0 800x
david  38268   0.0  0.2  3012352   4960   ??  S    11:02AM   0:00.24 /System/Library/Framewo
david  38261   0.0  3.4  3913364  70724 s002  S    11:02AM   0:08.51 /Applications/Firefox.a

How would I kill all processes that are either Xvfb or Firefox ?

Update: I was able to use $ sudo killall Xvfb to kill that process, but am still having trouble doing the same with Firefox:

davids-Mac-mini:financials david$ ps aux|grep firefox
david          /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -foreground
david          /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -foreground
david          grep firefox
davids-Mac-mini:financials david$ sudo killall firefox
No matching processes were found

Best Answer

If you want to do it by name:

killall firefox

If you want to kill a specific process, e.g. the first Firefox instance:

kill 38329

and if the process doesn't want to go, you can use:

kill -KILL 38261

There should be no way for a program to keep the OS from terminating it RIGHT NOW.

Update: To see a list of all available process names for the killall command, you can use:

ps -axco command | sort | uniq

Related Solutions

How to kill all processes except PID 1

On Linux at least,

kill -- -1

Will send the SIGTERM signal to every process it can except for the calling process (so the process running that kill command which could be the shell if kill is built-in there (it usually is on POSIX shells) or the process running a standalone kill command) and the process of pid 1.

Note that it does it as part of the kill() system call, so it's more reliable than using commands like pkill or killall (or the traditional killall command sometimes found as killall5 on Linux traditionally used for that) that first list the processes and then kill them as those would miss the processes that have been spawned in the mean time.

So it sounds like exactly what you want.

trap '' TERM # ignore SIGTERM ourselves though it wouldn't be needed 
             # in most shells
kill -- -1
sleep 1 # leave processes some time to exit cleanly on SIGTERM
kill -s KILL -- -1 # removes the remaining processes or those 
                   # that have started since without giving them
                   # a chance to clean-up.
exit

Should kill everything but the process of id 1.

You can experiment with it by running:

unshare --mount-proc -mpf

That starts a shell in a separate pid and mount namespace (with a new /proc (as used by ps/pkill/killall)) where that shell has pid 1.

Outside of Linux, kill -- -1 should work on every system at killing most processes, but the list of processes that are exempt from the killing can vary from system to system.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to kill all processes except PID 1

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