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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 FREEBSD

killall

KILLALL(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 						KILLALL(1)

NAME

     killall -- kill processes by name

SYNOPSIS

     killall [-delmsvz] [-help] [-I] [-j jail] [-u user] [-t tty] [-c procname] [-SIGNAL] [procname ...]

DESCRIPTION

     The killall utility kills processes selected by name, as opposed to the selection by PID as done by kill(1).  By default, it will send a TERM
     signal to all processes with a real UID identical to the caller of killall that match the name procname.  The super-user is allowed to kill
     any process.

     The options are as follows:

     -d | -v	  Be more verbose about what will be done.  For a single -d option, a list of the processes that will be sent the signal will be
		  printed, or a message indicating that no matching processes have been found.

     -e 	  Use the effective user ID instead of the (default) real user ID for matching processes specified with the -u option.

     -help	  Give a help on the command usage and exit.

     -I 	  Request confirmation before attempting to signal each process.

     -l 	  List the names of the available signals and exit, like in kill(1).

     -m 	  Match the argument procname as a (case sensitive) regular expression against the names of processes found.  CAUTION!	This is
		  dangerous, a single dot will match any process running under the real UID of the caller.

     -s 	  Show only what would be done, but do not send any signal.

     -SIGNAL	  Send a different signal instead of the default TERM.	The signal may be specified either as a name (with or without a leading
		  ``SIG''), or numerically.

     -j jail	  Kill processes in the specified jail.

     -u user	  Limit potentially matching processes to those belonging to the specified user.

     -t tty	  Limit potentially matching processes to those running on the specified tty.

     -c procname  Limit potentially matching processes to those matching the specified procname.

     -q 	  Suppress error message if no processes are matched.

     -z 	  Do not skip zombies.	This should not have any effect except to print a few error messages if there are zombie processes that
		  match the specified pattern.

ALL PROCESSES

     Sending a signal to all processes with the given UID is already supported by kill(1).  So use kill(1) for this job (e.g. ``kill -TERM -1'' or
     as root ``echo kill -TERM -1 | su -m <user>'').

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES

     This FreeBSD implementation of killall has completely different semantics as compared to the traditional UNIX System V behavior of killall.
     The latter will kill all processes that the current user is able to kill, and is intended to be used by the system shutdown process only.

EXIT STATUS

     The killall utility exits 0 if some processes have been found and signalled successfully.	Otherwise, a status of 1 will be returned.

DIAGNOSTICS

     Diagnostic messages will only be printed if requested by -d options.

SEE ALSO

     kill(1), pkill(1), sysctl(3), jail(8)

HISTORY

     The killall command appeared in FreeBSD 2.1.  It has been modeled after the killall command as available on other platforms.

AUTHORS

     The killall program was originally written in Perl and was contributed by Wolfram Schneider, this manual page has been written by Jorg
     Wunsch.  The current version of killall was rewritten in C by Peter Wemm using sysctl(3).

BSD
								   June 30, 2013							       BSD
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