Kill multiple users processes simultaneously

[Patriot_3]

I have times when I need to kill a users processes because their workstation may have lockup up or whatever. Is there a way, maybe a script that will kill all their processes at once? Thanks in advance.

PS I am new to HP-UX

[James Beamish-White]

All a users processes? Nasty! But this should work:

kill `ps -ef | grep posapp | awk '{print $2}'`

...but I hold no responsibility of harming your system due to this :-)

Cheers,
James

[Pete Randall]

Please see attached.

Pete

[Pete Randall]

And I echo James' caveats.

Pete

[Patriot_3]

I am wanting to kill a single user's processes, not everyone's. Sorry for the type "o".

[Pete Randall]

That's what my attachment does.

Pete

[Nick Wickens]

You could try this (where dxb is the userid example) -

for PID in $(ps -fudxb|tr -s " "|grep -v UID|cut -d" " -f3)
do
kill $PID
done

[Nick Wickens]

Oh by the way you have to make allowances in my suggestion if any of your userids use a full userid field - mine are all three chars long so its field two of the ps -fu output for me. It should be easy enough to lose the leading blank if any though.

[Shannon Petry]

#!/bin/sh
echo "Enter the user to dump"
read DUMPEE
CHECK=`grep ^$DUMPEE /etc/passwd|awk -F: '{print $1}'`
if [ ${CHECK}x = x ] ; then
echo "NO SUCH USER"
exit
else
#fall through
PIDLIST=/tmp/pidlist
if [ -f $PIDLIST ] ; then
rm -f $PIDLIST
fi
touch $PIDLIST
ps -ef | grep $DUMPEE|awk '{print $2}' >>$PIDLIST
for PID in `cat $PIDLIST` ; do
kill $PID
done
fi

Now, cuz i have all production machines at the site Im at, this is not tested. Dont complain if it kills your system like you think it should.

If you notice there are several key commands in the examples other than kill which you should get familiar with to fix things like this yerself in the future as well as scripting syntax given by others as well as myself. I'd recommend you get some books like "UNIX System Administration", "Unix in a Nutshell", and something on either the Korn or Borne shell published by O'Reilly and Associates

Regards,
Shannon

[Misa]

Here's my offering. It won't let root's processes be killed.

Usage:

twep username

The output is a little ugly (sorry, been lazy) but it gets the job done and I've never noticed it behaving wrong.

The name comes from the old BSD manual pages -- the 9 signal was "terminate with extreme prejudice." I suppose it's not politically correct any more... :(

--Misa

[Nick Wickens]

If you want to kill processes specific to a certain user in a script with a grep from the ps command then "ps -fu" is better to use than ps -ef.

If you are not carefull you could end up killing other processes as well - For example if you had a user called "paul" and an other user "paula" a grep for paul from ps -ef will call up paula as well. Likewise a grep for Paul will also pull up "bigpaul" if you have a user called bigpaul.

You can get around this by putting spaces around your grep ie grep " paul " or by using "^" etc but "ps -fupaul" will only pull up processes for paul.

[Shannon Petry]

Did anything here help you fix your problem?
If so, why not take the 30 seconds from your day to assign points to people who took longer than that to answer your request for help?
If not then what is missing from the responses to help you solve your problem?

Regards,
Shannon

[Tom Spence_1]

Or a simple way to do:

kill -9 `ps -fu [username] | grep -v "PID" | awk '{print $2}'`

Hope it helps.

-Tom