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Preston Cole
Asked: 2018-04-12 12:25:04 +0800 CST

Looking to use kill -9 instead of killall

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Looking to use kill -9 instead of killall using process name.

Is there a way I can grep or awk the pid of a given process name/s then kill it will kill -9 ? killall fails a lot for me.

I'm looking to script this for numerous remote machines.
Process name will be one of three.
I want to use something like:

sshpass -p 'password' ssh -n $user@$hostname "one liner to use kill -9"

Any ideas?

command-line kill killall

1 Answers

  1. The -9 argument you mentioned specifies the signal kill shall send to the process in question. The default is SIGTERM (terminate application), 9 is equivalent to SIGKILL (kill the application immediately and most brutally).

    killall accepts signal arguments (like -9 or -KILL, I prefer the symbolic names over numbers) too:

    killall -KILL processname

    Alternatively, there is pkill, which kills processes that match a given command pattern, which accepts signal arguments just as well. You can "preview" what would be killed by it using pgrep -a, which lists the matching progresses instead of sending a signal and killing them:

    pgrep -a processname
pkill processname

    If you want to match your pattern against the whole command including its arguments and not just the base command, add the -f switch:

    pgrep -a -f something
pkill -f something

    For more information, check the relevant manual pages: man kill, man killall, man pkill for the various kill commands and man 7 signal for an overview of available signals.

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