grep is a really bad idea for searching ps output. For very unusual process names that are guarenteed never to be duplicated on the command line as a parameter (like in a grep command) or as a user or group ID, you can get away with using ps -e ... | grep something
But let's suppose you want to get rid of all sh processes. If you do this:
ps -ef | grep sh
you will see some processes that you NEVER want to kill such as unhasdaemon. grep does not match a specific field, it matches anything on the line, so "grep sh" matches sh ksh csh bash unhasdaemon and even user or group names such sherry (who might be running vi on a critical file).
ALWAYS use "ps -C inserverD" because this does not use grep. Instead, -C looks in the process table and does an EXACT match. It will not find inserverD123 or XinserverD. Now the -C option (and -H and -o) are XPG$ options and must be enabled with the temporary variable UNIX95. Just put the temp assignment in front of ps:
UNIX95=1 ps -fC inserverD
and magically, only inserverD processes will be found. This also finds any possible way of starting the process, from /inserver54_pro/bin/inserverD to ./inserverD and so on. Note that -C is much faster than -e and grep.
Once you have the inserverD list, then you can kill the processes using kill -15 first, then kill -1 if any are left, and finally kill -9 if the first 2 do not work.
Bill Hassell, sysadmin
