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The killall command

killall sends a signal to all processes running any of the specified commands. If no signal name is specified, SIGTERM is sent. In general, killall command kills all processes by knowing the name of the process.

Signals can be specified either by name (e.g. -HUP or -SIGHUP) or by number (e.g. -1) or by option -s.

If the command name is not a regular expression (option -r) and contains a slash (/), processes executing that particular file will be selected for killing, independent of their name.

killall returns a zero return code if at least one process has been killed for each listed command, or no commands were listed and at least one process matched the -u and -Z search criteria. killall returns non-zero otherwise.

A killall process never kills itself (but may kill other killall processes).

Examples:

  1. Kill all processes matching the name conky with SIGTERM:

```sh killall conky

OR

killall -SIGTERM conky

OR

kilall -15 conky ```

I was able to kill Wine ( which are Windows exe files running on Linux ) applications this way too.

sh killall TQ.exe

  1. List all the supported signals:

sh $ killall -l HUP INT QUIT ILL TRAP ABRT BUS FPE KILL USR1 SEGV USR2 PIPE ALRM TERM STKFLT CHLD CONT STOP TSTP TTIN TTOU URG XCPU XFSZ VTALRM PROF WINCH POLL PWR SYS

As for the numbers.

sh $ for s in $(killall -l); do echo -n "$s " && kill -l $s; done HUP 1 INT 2 QUIT 3 ILL 4 TRAP 5 ABRT 6 BUS 7 FPE 8 KILL 9 USR1 10 SEGV 11 USR2 12 PIPE 13 ALRM 14 TERM 15 STKFLT 16 CHLD 17 CONT 18 STOP 19 TSTP 20 TTIN 21 TTOU 22 URG 23 XCPU 24 XFSZ 25 VTALRM 26 PROF 27 WINCH 28 POLL 29 PWR 30 SYS 31

  1. Ask before killing, to prevent unwanted kills:

sh $ killall -i conky Kill conky(1685) ? (y/N)

  1. Kill all processes and wait until the processes die.

sh killall -w conky

  1. Kill based on time:

```sh

Kill all firefox younger than 2 minutes

killall -y 2m firefox

Kill all firefox older than 2 hours

killall -o 2h firefox ```

Syntax:

sh killall [OPTION]... [--] NAME... killall -l, --list killall -V, --version

Additional Flags and their Functionalities:

Short Flag Long Flag Description
-e --exact require an exact match for very long names
-I --ignore-case case insensitive process name match
-g --process-group kill process group instead of process
-y --younger-than kill processes younger than TIME
-o --older-than kill processes older than TIME
-i --interactive ask for confirmation before killing
-l --list list all known signal names
-q --quiet don't print complaints
-r --regexp interpret NAME as an extended regular expression
-s --signal SIGNAL send this signal instead of SIGTERM
-u --user USER kill only process(es) running as USER
-v --verbose report if the signal was successfully sent
-w --wait wait for processes to die
-n --ns PID match processes that belong to the same namespaces as PID
-Z --context REGEXP kill only process(es) having context (must precede other arguments)

kill, pidof

Last update: 2022-05-12
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