Kill All command

[Kyle D. Harris]

What do you do if say you have 100 processes and want maybe 90 killed. How do you kill 90 but keep 10? Is there a quick easy way? Thanks

[Mark Grant]

No there isn't.

You could, of course, kill all 100 with the "killall" command and then start 10 up again.

[Olivier Drouin · Accepted solution]

kill -9 `ps -ef | grep process | awk '{print $2}' | tail -90`

... or something like that. If your program is setup as a father/child then you will have to add some code not the kill the father.

[Thierry Poels_1]

Hi,

how about something like:

ps -ef |grep telnet | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | tail +11 | xargs kill

(just hoping "tail +n" is supported under Linux ;)
good luck,
Thierry.

[Mark Grant]

Shows how much I know :)

However, I would point out that selecting processes by "grep" is rather dangerous as you can kill thinks you didn't expect unless extreme care is taken.

Also, please don't kill -9 unless your really have to. -15 or just plain "kill" allows the process to exit gracefully, closing files and doing any clean up it requires whereas -9 kills it dead. Many applications fail when you restart them if this happens.

[Jerome Henry]

And (no criticism here of course) yu don't really select which you kill and which you save, except that yu keep 10 of them...

J

[Kyle D. Harris]

Lol Mark....

[Jim Butler]

kill `ps -e | grep procname | awk '{print $1}' `

- my favorite way -

Good Luck

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Somebody mentioned father/child realations and to take care not to kill the father. That can also work the other way round. In case these are all sub processes of a single parent process it might be enough to just kill that parent process to make them all go away...