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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 BSD

kill

KILL(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   KILL(1)

NAME

       kill - terminate a process with extreme prejudice

SYNOPSIS

       kill [ -sig ] processid ...
       kill -l

DESCRIPTION

       Kill  sends the TERM (terminate, 15) signal to the specified processes.	If a signal name or number preceded by `-' is given as first argu-
       ment, that signal is sent instead of terminate (see sigvec(2)).	 The  signal  names  are  listed  by  `kill  -l',  and	are  as  given	in
       /usr/include/signal.h, stripped of the common SIG prefix.

       The  terminate  signal  will  kill  processes  that do not catch the signal; `kill -9 ...' is a sure kill, as the KILL (9) signal cannot be
       caught.	By convention, if process number 0 is specified, all members in the process group  (i.e.  processes  resulting	from  the  current
       login)  are  signaled  (but  beware:  this works only if you use sh(1); not if you use csh(1).)	Negative process numbers also have special
       meanings; see kill(2) for details.

       The killed processes must belong to the current user unless he is the super-user.

       The process number of an asynchronous process started with `&' is reported by the shell.  Process numbers can also be found by using ps(1).
       Kill  is  a  built-in  to  csh(1); it allows job specifiers of the form ``%...'' as arguments so process id's are not as often used as kill
       arguments.  See csh(1) for details.

SEE ALSO

       csh(1), ps(1), kill(2), sigvec(2)

BUGS

       A replacement for ``kill 0'' for csh(1) users should be provided.

4th Berkeley Distribution					  April 20, 1986							   KILL(1)
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