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Full Discussion: KILL without PID
Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users KILL without PID Post 302220914 by era on Saturday 2nd of August 2008 03:32:56 AM
Old 08-02-2008
If your system has pidof, use that. Otherwise, the customary solution is to run grep on a ps listing of your processes, and use that to find the PID to pass to kill. However, a naive attempt will have the problem that it will find itself in the process listing, and commit suicide instead of kill the intended target. The proper workaround for that is to use a regular expression which does not directly match itself as the search string.

Unfortunately, the options and output format of ps varies from one system to another. The following works for me on a recent version of Ubuntu.

Code:
ps t | awk '$5 ~ /^[t]estscript/ { print $1 }' | xargs -r kill

The use of [t] instead of just a plain t is the workaround for the "script will kill itself" problem. The use of xargs -r prevents kill from being run at all if there are no matches (there would only be a warning message about running kill with no arguments, so that is not a very fatal problem).

The option t and the field numbers $1 and $5 might need to be changed for your system. If you google for a similar solution for your particular platform, look out for the problems outlined above. For stylistic reasons, a single awk script should be preferred over what is affectionately called Useless Use of Grep.
Last edited by era; 08-02-2008 at 04:44 AM..
 

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LEARN ABOUT SUSE

kill

KILL(1) 							   User Commands							   KILL(1)

NAME

       kill - send signals to processes, or list signals

SYNOPSIS

       kill [-s SIGNAL | -SIGNAL] PID...
       kill -l [SIGNAL]...
       kill -t [SIGNAL]...

DESCRIPTION

       Send signals to processes, or list signals.

       Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

       -s, --signal=SIGNAL, -SIGNAL

	      specify the name or number of the signal to be sent

       -l, --list
	      list signal names, or convert signal names to/from numbers

       -t, --table
	      print a table of signal information

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
	      output version information and exit

       SIGNAL  may  be	a  signal name like `HUP', or a signal number like `1', or the exit status of a process terminated by a signal.  PID is an
       integer; if negative it identifies a process group.

       NOTE: your shell may have its own version of kill, which usually supersedes the version described here.	Please refer to your shell's docu-
       mentation for details about the options it supports.

AUTHOR

       Written by Paul Eggert.

REPORTING BUGS

       Report kill bugs to bug-coreutils@gnu.org
       GNU coreutils home page: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       General help using GNU software: <http://www.gnu.org/gethelp/>

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
       This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO

       kill(2)

       The  full documentation for kill is maintained as a Texinfo manual.  If the info and kill programs are properly installed at your site, the
       command

	      info coreutils 'kill invocation'

       should give you access to the complete manual.

GNU coreutils 7.1						     July 2010								   KILL(1)
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