Kill a bunch of processes with the same name

ps ax | grep <processname> | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | sudo xargs kill -9

-5
By: copyhacker
2009-03-24 19:52:47
awk grep kill ps sudo xargs
5
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What Others Think

Perhaps a use of killall instead?
cde1985 · 881 weeks ago
or pkill?
sander85 · 881 weeks ago
and please don't use kill -9, this is very bad behaviour. Please try it with kill -15 and if it doesn't end the process kill -2. Then you can still use kill -9.
lme · 880 weeks and 6 days ago
Wow. grep piped to grep piped to awk. Never thought I'd see that.
atoponce · 880 weeks and 5 days ago
Apart from the fact that there's pkill and killall (depending on the OS), there are quite a lot of things that can be improved in this command line. First, this is a nice trick to avoid the ugly "grep -v grep" part: ps ax | grep '[p]rocessname' Note that the first letter is enclosed in square brackets. This regular expression will match 'processname', but it will not match the grep command itself. Second, it doesn't make sense to pipe from grep to awk because awk has a "built-in grep": ps ax | awk '/[p]rocessname/{print $1}'
inof · 871 weeks and 1 day ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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