Unix Tip: KILLING ALL USER PROCESSES

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Unix Tip 3173 - October 14, 2009

http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?tip.today

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KILLING ALL USER PROCESSES

The common method for killing all of a users processes usually involves grepping the users name from 'ps', then using awk to get the process id's and submitting them to 'kill -9'.

Sys V
ex: kill -9 $(ps -fuusername | awk '{ print $2 }' )

BSDish
ex: kill -9 $(ps -aux |grep username | awk '{ print $2 }' )

The problems with doing this way are that it is slow, and more importantly, it doesn't always kill all of the processes on the first try.

There is a way to do this that always kills all of the users processes the first time, and is very fast:

su - username -c 'kill -9 -1'

This tip generously supported by: jkstill@teleport.com

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