Kill Script Using Linux Shell (bash)

Here is a script written in bash that kills a process with the signature provided as a parameter.

NOTES:
- In RedHat Linux you can use /bin/sh as sh does not exist in Linux and it is pointing to bash instead
- In UBUNTU you need to specify /bin/bash as /bin/sh is pointing to dash by default
- I did not have a chance to test this script in other UNIX systems

#!/bin/bash # Script name itself (we will ignore it, # as we do not want to kill our own script) mysignature=$0 # Signature of a process to kill procsig=$1 echo Lookig to kill processes with signature :$procsig: # Trim spaces read -rd '' param1 <<< "$procsig" # Check that we suuplied a process signature, # and that it is not empty if [ "$param1" = "" ] then echo Need process name pattern exit 1 fi echo Loking up process signature :$procsig: # Get PID(s) of the process(es) to be killed processes= \ `ps auxwww | grep " $procsig" | grep -v grep | grep -v $mysignature | cut -c10-15` if [ "$processes" = "" ] then echo No process like :$procsig: running exit 1 fi echo Killing PIDs $processes echo $processes | xargs -t kill

To run this script- create a file called (for example) stop_script.sh, copy the provided script into that file.

Run it (for example to kill all vi sessions) as follows

stop_script.sh "vi"

Kill Script Using Perl

Sometimes you need to have a process that kills other processes.
Here is a small perl script that kills all the processes with a particular pattern in the name (" vi" in this case).

#!/usr/bin/perl @pids = `ps auxwww | grep " vi" | grep -v grep | cut -c10-15`; foreach(@pids){ $killcmd = "kill -9 " . $_; print "executing " . $killcmd; `$killcmd`; }

NOTES
- ps auxwww returns all running processes with full information known to the system

- grep " vi" finds processes with pattern " vi" in the output of ps

- grep -v grep excludes grep itself (we do not want to kill our grep) as the pattern we are looking for exists in grep, it will be picked up as just another process to be killed

-cut -c10-15 returns only PIDs

Once the list of PIDs is created we can loop through it killing processes (use -9 if you want to kill immediately interrupting IO).