Hi,

in AIX, I believe I can kill off all background processes I started with killall, like:

$ my-db-stress-script &
$ my-db-stress-script &

$ killall

But I have great trouble to come up with a similar solution for Linux, even within pdksh in linux.

Does anybody know if there is a command in Linux and AIX that lets me kill my background processes easily, and if not, how to do this in Linux alone?

Johann

1. killall -9 my-db-stress-script
2. ps -aux | grep my-db-stress-script and then kill -9 pid (process id)

You should be able to do a simple shell script like:

for i in `ps -ef|grep my-db-stress-script|awk '{print $2}'`
do
kill -9 $i
done

This should work on most variants of UNIX.

Hi ika and astralvoid,

that's along the lines I settled with, but I would like to do something safer than search the process list.

So I take it there is no system command to say something like

kill that process and all its childs in a single stroke

in linux?

Johann

If you do an fg you can bring the process to the foreground.
if you do a bg you can put it to the background.

Eg
# somescript &
[1] 17921

# kill %1

will kill that process.

Srikanth

That's a good way to kill one process, but if there's multiple background jobs, some of which you don't want to kill, it'll not work.

The shell should have a 'jobs' command which lists all the commands running in the background for this instance of the shell, rather than the machine's whole process table. You can munge that output and kill the relevant ones:

for i in `jobs | grep my-db-stress-script | sed -e 's/\].*$//' -e 's/^.*\[//'`; do eval kill %$i; done

For killing a particular process, "kill <pid>" works as in most *nix.

"kill -9" is too aggresive a command to remove a process and all it's children, it kills the process immediately. "man kill" or "man signal" should give you more info on the severity of signals.

hmmm....on linux you could also use the pstree -p <username> command to find your bg process ,pipe them to a sed and kill em. In that way you wont miss the child pids forked by your background processes and would not reult in Zombie processes.

There's a race condition in there, skrishnaswamy. What would happen if, between the output of pstree and the kill commands, one of the processes forks a child? pstree won't have listed it.

It's better to use the kernel to find all of the process' children (its response to the signal) rather than a userspace utility.