How to stop all instances of cron?

Question

I have a cron job that executes a rake task in rails. I noticed in the log that it was running the task 4 times everytime it was executed. The problem is that there are 4 instances of cron running.

I ran:

/etc/init.d/crond stop

And now there are only three.

Running:

ps -ef | grep cron

I see this:

root      1029     1  0 Oct20 ?        00:00:01 crond
root      6980  6094  0 21:33 pts/0    00:00:00 grep cron
root     15170     1  0 Oct26 ?        00:00:00 crond start
root     15186     1  0 Oct26 ?        00:00:00 crond stop

So my question is how do I stop the other instances. When I run the stop command now I get this:

Stopping crond: cannot stop crond: crond is not running. [FAILED]

Any ideas? Do the other instances have different names? Is there a way to kill all instances as once?

Solution 1

sudo killall crond

Solution 2

Looks like you are going to have to kill them manually

killall crond

or

kill -9 pid1 pid2 ...

Then restart with init.d

Comments

[Admin]

This is probably a question better suited for unix.stackexchange.com, it may get closed as off-topic here.

[Greg Hewgill]

With killall, it's worth noting that on some Unix systems (Solaris comes to mind), killall kills all processes. This usually causes your computer to stop entirely.

[Greg Hewgill]

With killall, it's worth noting that on some Unix systems (Solaris comes to mind), killall kills all processes. This usually causes your computer to stop entirely.

[GUYMESSEDUP]

...that'd still fix it ;)

[Paweł Polewicz]

He used a linux tag, so it's probably not Solaris. On linux this send-sigterm-to-all-pids tool was renamed to killall5.

[Dennis Williamson]

Only use -9 as a last resort. Use the default which is SIGTERM (15). This gives processes a chance to do cleanup and exit gracefully.