KILLALL (1)
kill processes by name
SYNOPSIS
l
killall
[ -egiqvw ]
[ -\fIsignal\fB ]
name ...
killall
-l
killall
-V
b
DESCRIPTION
killall
sends a signal to all processes running any of the specified commands. If no
signal name is specified, SIGTERM is sent.
Signals can be specified either by name (e.g. -HUP) or by number
(e.g. -1). Signal 0 (check if a process exists) can only be specified
by number.
If the command name contains a slash (/), processes executing that
particular file will be selected for killing, independent of their name.
killall returns a non-zero return code if no process has been killed
for any of the listed commands. If at least one process has been killed for
each command, killall returns zero.
A killall process never kills itself (but may kill other killall
processes).
OPTIONS
Require an exact match for very long names. If a command name is longer
than 15 characters, the full name may be unavailable (i.e. it is swapped
out). In this case, killall will kill everything that matches within
the first 15 characters. With -e, such entries are skipped.
killall prints a message for each skipped entry
if -v is specified in addition to -e,
Kill the process group to which the process belongs. The kill signal is only
sent once per group, even if multiple processes belonging to the same process
group were found.
Interactively ask for confirmation before killing.
List all known signal names.
Do not complain if no processes were killed.
Report if the signal was successfully sent.
Display version information.
Wait for all killed processes to die. killall checks once per second if
any of the killed processes still exist and only returns if none are left.
Note that killall may wait forever if the signal was ignored, had no
effect, or if the process stays in zombie state.
FILES
/proc location of the proc file system
KNOWN BUGS
Killing by file only works for executables that are kept open during
execution, i.e. impure executables can't be killed this way.
Be warned that typing killall name may not have the desired
effect on non-Linux systems, especially when done by a privileged
user.
killall -w doesn't detect if a process disappears and is replaced by
a new process with the same PID between scans.
AUTHOR
Werner Almesberger <Werner.Almesberger@epfl.ch>
SEE ALSO
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