How do I kill processes older than "t"?

GNU Killall can kill processes older than a given age, using their processname.

if [[ "$(uname)" = "Linux" ]];then killall --older-than 1h page.py;fi

find doesnt always work, not every system has etimes available, and it might be my regex newb status, but I dont think you need anything more than this:

ps -eo pid,etimes,comm,user,tty | awk '{if ($4 ~ /builder/ && $5 ~ /pts/ && $2>600) print $1}'

• list all processes and provide columns PID,ELAPSED(etimes = seconds), COMMAND, USER, TT (thanks @ahoffman)
• with awk print the PID where the 4th column ($4, USER) contains text 'builder', and 5th column ($5, TT) contains text 'pts' and the ELAPSED column has a value larger than 600 sec (thanks @amtd)

you can then pipe that to kill or whatever your need may be.

Thanks to Christopher's answer I was able to adapt it to the following:

find /proc -maxdepth 1 -user apache -type d -mmin +60 -exec basename {} \; \
| xargs ps | grep page.py | awk '{ print $1 }' | sudo xargs kill

-mmin was the find command I was missing.

# get elapsed time in seconds, filter our only those who >= 3600 sec
ps axh -O etimes  | awk '{if ($2 >= 3600) print $2}'

If you want you can feed ps with list of PIDs to lookup within, for e. g.:

ps h -O etimes 1 2 3

I think you can modify some of those previous answers to fit your needs. Namely:

for FILE in (find . -maxdepth 1 -user processuser -type d -mmin +60)
  do kill -9 $(basename $FILE) # I can never get basename to work with find's exec.  Let me know if you know how!
done

Or

ps -eo pid,etime,comm | awk '$2!~/^..:..$/ && $3~/page\.py/ { print $1}' | kill -9

I think the second may best fit your needs. The find version would wind up nuking other processes by that user


--Christopher Karel

apt-get install psmisc

killall -o 1h $proc_name

The problem

Converting etime (elapsed time) column of ps command to seconds. The time specification is in this format [[dd-]hh:]mm:ss. Newer versions of ps have an etimes column which outputs etime value in seconds.

The solution: simple custom awk function

This custom awk function supports all formats of etime column (e.g. 03-12:30:59, 00:07 etc.). Just paste it in your awk script, it is one-liners friendly solution.

function sec(T){C=split(T,A,"[:-]"); return A[C>3?C-3:99]*86400 + A[C>2?C-2:99]*3600 + A[C>1?C-1:99]*60 + A[C>0?C-0:99]*1}

• sec(T) converts T to seconds
• T time specification in [[dd-]hh:]mm:ss format (e.g. etime)
• C count of fields in T (equivalent to awk's NF variable)
• A array of fields in T (equivalent to awk's $ variable)
• A[C>3?C-3:99] this is safe way to reference the fourth value (i.e. number of days) in reverse order. This approach is useful because days and hours are optional. If the array is not long enough it dereference A[99] which will yield 0 value. I assume 99 is high enough for most use cases.
• returns seconds as integer

Real world example

This bash oneliner will kill soffice.bin process running under current user if the process is older than 180 seconds.

kill -9 $(ps cx -o command,etime,pid | awk '/^soffice.bin/ {if (sec($2)>180) {print $3}} function sec(T){C=split(T,A,"[:-]"); return A[C>3?C-3:99]*86400 + A[C>2?C-2:99]*3600 + A[C>1?C-1:99]*60 + A[C>0?C-0:99]*1}')

The lstart field in ps gives a consistent time format which we can feed to date to convert to seconds since the epoch. Then we just compare that to the current time.

#!/bin/bash
current_time=$(date +%s)
ps axo lstart=,pid=,cmd= |
    grep page.py |
    while read line
    do
        # 60 * 60 is one hour, multiply additional or different factors for other thresholds 
        if (( $(date -d "${line:0:25}" +%s) < current_time - 60 * 60 ))
        then
            echo $line | cut -d ' ' -f 6    # change echo to kill
        fi
    done

this should work

killall --older-than 1h $proc_name

I modified the answer they gave you in previous post

ps -eo pid,etime,comm | 
egrep '^ *[0-9]+ +([0-9]+-[^ ]*|[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}) +/usr/bin/python2.6 /u/apps/pysnpp/current/bin/page.py' | 
awk '{print $1}' | 
xargs kill

The regular expression searches for 2 types of second argument:

• Days in the form of digits and a minus sign.
• Hours:minutes:seconds expression.

That should match everything except young processes who would have the form minutes:seconds.