Commands using killall

Example: killall - HUP firefox

Closes all instances processes matching firefox.

Purges DNS cache of OS X.

dscacheutil -flushcache does not work since OS X 10.7.

I use this loop for a variety of things. If a process won't die, I try to ask it nicely to let it die gracefully, and then i use killall and kill -9 to end its life. This will run the program killall and then start it again when it completes, indefinately.

easiest method to kill Google Chrome

The other 2 commands that are listed will also kill the egrep process and any libexec processes because the .exe isn't escaped so it is really using . meaning anything containing exe. The command i posted escapes the (dot) in .exe and then filters the actual egrep process so that it doesn't get killed before the other processes being killed. Also added the -9 switch for kill to send sigterm to the processes, in case people are wondering why processes aren't getting killed after running just kill . This should work better for people :)

Kills process by name

* ps -ef # list running processes

* grep string

* pull the process names from 8th field

* cut and delimiter '/'

* print 4th field

* get rid of trailing grep

* for loop killall -9 $i which is the process name

This kills Activity Monitor

Insert an additional (moveable) spacer on the right side of the Dock in Mac OS X

Insert an additional (moveable) spacer on the left side of the Dock in Mac OS X

requires sp-auth installed

This command will auto kill sp-sc after vlc is closed, so u wont have to do it manually

This is usefull when we don't know the exact name of the process, but the application name

A limitation is that the regular expression only tries to match the last part of the full command (i.e. the bin file name itself).

But this is way shorter than the following one:

ps axww | grep SomeCommand | awk '{ print $1 }' | xargs kill

Place it in your bashrc and running the command radio it will turn on or off each time it runs. Only one command needed. Obviously you can set it to any station you like.

Kills all xmms running

This will kill all. e.g. killall firefox

This command is suitable to use as application launching command for a desktop shortcut. It checks if the application is already running by pgrepping its process ID, and offer user to kill the old process before starting a new one.

It is useful for a few x11 application that, if re-run, is more likely a mistake. In my example, x2vnc is an x11 app that does not quit when its connection is broken, and would not work well when a second process establish a second connection after the first broken one.

The LC_ALL=C for xmesseng is necessary for OpenSUSE systems to avoid a bug. If you don't find needing it, remove the "env LC_ALL=C" part

Use this if you can't type repeated killall commands fast enough to kill rapidly spawning processes.

If a process keeps spawning copies of itself too rapidly, it can do so faster than a single killall can catch them and kill them. Retyping the command at the prompt can be too slow too, even with command history retrieval.

Chaining a few killalls on single command line can start up the next killall more quickly. The first killall will get most of the processes, except for some that were starting up in the meanwhile, the second will get most of the rest, and the third mops up.

"killall -USR1 dd" does not work in OS X for me. However, sending INFO instead of USR1 works.

every 1sec sends DD the USR1 signal which causes DD to print its progress.

The following command will clone usb stick inside /dev/sdc to /dev/sdd

Double check you got the correct usb sticks (origional-clone)with fdisk -l.

Stops when the (last) dd process exits.

Uses process signal to play next selection