Casey at Large

Does this look familiar?:

ps aux|grep "YOUR_PROGRAM --WITH-SOME-SPECIAL-SWITCHES"
1000 28319 0.0 2.6 54884 47340 ? S Feb16 0:01 YOUR_PROGRAM --WITH-SOME-SPECIAL-SWITCHES
1000 28330 0.0 2.6 54880 47360 ? S Feb16 0:01 YOUR_PROGRAM --WITH-SOME-SPECIAL-SWITCHES
1000 28347 0.0 2.6 54884 47336 ? S Feb16 0:01 YOUR_PROGRAM --WITH-SOME-SPECIAL-SWITCHES
kill 28319
kill 28330
kill 28347

If it does then STOP! Use this one-liner instead to kill all processes matching YOUR_PROGRAM –WITH-SOME-SPECIAL-SWITCHES:

ps|grep -v grep|grep "YOUR_PROGRAM --WITH-SOME-SPECIAL-SWITCHES"|awk '{print $1}'|xargs kill


Here’s what the one-liner does:
1. ps Outputs all processes you’re running.
2. grep -v grep Matches any data piped (|) in other than “grep”. This prevents the one-liner from trying to kill the running grep command.
3. grep "YOUR_PROGRAM --WITH-SOME-SPECIAL-SWITCHES" Matches only output with your YOUR_PROGRAM –WITH-SOME-SPECIAL-SWITCHES in it.
4. awk '{print$1}' Select the first column of data from the previously matched output, in this case the PID (process ID).
5. xargs kill calls kill for each PID.

Note: If your want to kill _all_ processes running and not just a subset (i.e. –WITH-SOME-SPECIAL-SWITCHES) you can use killall YOUR_PROGRAM

In summary, if you find yourself killing similar processes one at a time, use this simple one-liner to kill them all at once. Also you could turn this into a simple shell script.