I want to kill all processes that result from the following command

Question

The following command will display all the PID's running for vmstat1:

ps -ef | grep "vmstat 1" | awk '{ print $2 }'

My question is, how do I kill them all, if there's like 20 of them at once?

Solution 1

If your command produces list of PIDs, then simply pipe it into:

xargs kill

Note that your command will match the grep command as well, so consider adding something like |grep -v grep before the original grep command.

Solution 2

Just use pkill. Though not a standard command, it is found in many Unices and is dedicated to this kind of tasks.

pkill -f 'vmstat 1'

Also note that your grep will match vmstat 1 but also vmstat 10 and grep vmstat 1 (so would that pkill above), and awk is a superset of grep. To be more robust, you could do instead:

ps -Ao pid,args | awk '$2 == "vmstat" && $3 == "1" {print $1}' | xargs kill

Or

pkill -xf 'vmstat 1'

Comments

[Mathias Begert]

have you looked at pkill?

[Kotte]

Couldn't you use kill $(pidof vmstat) or pidof vmstat | xargs kill?

[I AM L]

@Kotte I don't seem to have the 'pidof' command, as I'm currently running this on a Solaris box.

[Kevdog777]

Can $ killall vmstat not do it for you?

[Richard Fortune]

Another idiom to avoid having the grep itself in the list is to use "grep '[f]oo'" instead of "grep 'foo'". Can't type backquotes on this android keypad, annoyingly.

[otokan]

You can (and should) get rid of grep in this case: ps -ef | awk '/vmstat 1/ { print "kill " $2 }' | bash

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

Just use pkill… if you have it! I AM L may not be running Linux.

[Stéphane Chazelas]

@Gilles. pkill is not a Linux invention. I believe it originated in Solaris and it is also found at least in FreeBSD, NetBSD. But it's true it's not a standard command, I'll add the note.

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

“The pkill and pgrep utilities first appeared in NetBSD 1.6. They are modelled after utilities of the same name that appeared in Sun Solaris 7. They made their first appearance in FreeBSD 5.3.” Also OpenBSD 3.5. Quickly made its way into Linux. Not de facto standard because it is missing from OSX.

[Razzlero]

The "!/grep/" gets rid of grep.

[otokan]

You don't have to use grep command at all in this case.

[Jeff Schaller]

Looks like the stackexchange formatter turned your backticks into code, making for a misleading answer. You might have intended: kill -9 $(pgrep -f vmstat)