Question

Script to kill multiple processes

Asked by: sns-emea

I have a solution hosted on a Unix HP-UX B.11.11 U 9000/800 system. This program opens several instances of the same process. I am trying to create a batch which filters by process name and pass the pid to be killed.

I tried the below which did not work out for me.

ps -elf | grep | gawk '{print$1}' | xargs kill -9

Can you please update me with another solutions which loops and kill the processes identified by same name but have different PID's.

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Asked On
2009-11-03 at 06:34:40ID24867121
Topics

HP-UX Unix

,

Unix Operating Systems

,

KornShell (ksh)

Participating Experts
5
Points
500
Comments
13

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Answers

 

by: woolmilkporcPosted on 2009-11-03 at 06:43:51ID: 25729379

ps -elf | grep "string" | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq | xargs -I{} echo kill -9 {}

Change "string" to your search criteria.

Please note that I put an echo in front of kill. Remove it when you're sure what you're doing.

wmp

 

by: askbPosted on 2009-11-03 at 06:47:12ID: 25729413

ps -ef | grep -i seamonkey | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9 -

replace seamonkey with the user name / process name or some other info.

 

by: woolmilkporcPosted on 2009-11-03 at 06:48:34ID: 25729429

Btw. doesn't HPUX have pkill ? Try "man pkill"!

 

by: woolmilkporcPosted on 2009-11-03 at 07:09:25ID: 25729646

pkill - part of Ptools since HPUX 11.31

 

by: sns-emeaPosted on 2009-11-03 at 07:11:29ID: 25729668

Thank you for the above but the thing is that the above  statement kills one instance at a time and does not loop till all instances are killed.

 

by: woolmilkporcPosted on 2009-11-03 at 07:44:08ID: 25730026

Did you try my version? It should not spare any PID associated with "string".

Or how do you define "instance" here?

 

by: askbPosted on 2009-11-03 at 07:55:47ID: 25730181

the above versions in which 'xargs' are used loops kill for all the pids.

 

by: woolmilkporcPosted on 2009-11-03 at 08:00:46ID: 25730261

Yes, askb or, in other words, "xargs" builds an implicite loop over its arguments.

 

by: simon3270Posted on 2009-11-03 at 09:20:11ID: 25731211

Or you could use

kill -9 $(ps -ef| grep seamonkey|awk '{print $2}'

As with all of the above, this will try to kill the "grep" command itself, and will throw an error if there are no processes with that name.

To avoid both of these errors, you could use:

PIDS=$(ps -ef | grep '[ ]'seamonkey|awk '{print $2}')
if [ ! -s $PIDS ]
then
  kill -9 $PIDS
fi

The '[ ]' in front of the name avoids "grep" matching its own command, and the "if" test stops killing an empty list.  The "kill" command kills all of the pids in one go.

The reason for using xargs above is if the list of pids is very long.  It would have to be several thousand pids to cause a problem with command-line length.

 

by: simon3270Posted on 2009-11-03 at 09:23:25ID: 25731250

Agh, cut and pasted the wrong version!

The script should be:

PIDS=$(ps -ef | grep '[ ]'seamonkey|awk '{print $2}')
if [ -n "$PIDS" ]
then
  kill -9 $PIDS
fi

 

by: vinit_kainPosted on 2009-11-03 at 09:31:26ID: 25731341

Hi,

Try attached script

Vinit

#!/bin/ksh
command=$1
while [ `ps -eo pid,comm|grep $command|grep -v grep|awk '{print "kill -9 "$1}'|wc -l` -ne 0 ]
do
{
`ps -eo pid,comm|grep $command|grep -v grep|awk '{print "kill -9 "$1}'`
}
done
                                              
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Select allOpen in new window

 

by: JJSmithPosted on 2009-11-03 at 14:04:34ID: 25734301


Use the UNIX95= variant of the ps command.

That will enable you to identify PIDs based on the command executed, without using grep.
I don't have access to a machine to try it out, but it should be something like:

UNIX95= ps -C "process_name" -o pid=""  | xargs kill -9

Note: there must be a space character or tab following the equal sign and before the 'ps' command:

Try it without the kill to see the list of PID's are what you expect them to be.

Regards
JJ

 

by: JJSmithPosted on 2009-11-03 at 14:14:15ID: 25734409


If ths UNIX95 version works then you could 1 line it, as kill takes multiple PIDs - something like:

kill -9  $(UNIX95= ps -C "process_name" -o pid=)

Regards
JJ

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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