Kill only one Java process

Question

I usually run few Java applications, one for server running locally and other for some IDE like NetBeans. And from time to time, after lots of redeployments, my server get stuck on OutOfMemoryException so I need to kill Java process in order to reboot.

So I do pkill -9 java but this also kills my running IDE which I don't want to. So how do I kill only application linked to running server and not the other ones?I assume that they all are running under same process but there has to be some way how to distuingish them.

Solution 1

For killing a process that is associated with multiple processes, you need to kill that by using process id associated with that process.

To get the process id of that java process run

ps -A |grep java

output of this command will give the list of java processes running on your system. Note down Process ID (PID) of that process whom you want to kill and run

kill -9 PID

Solution 2

IMO the best solution is:

pkill -9 -f <nameOfYourJavaAplication>

Solution 3

You can simply use

jps -l

command to get all of the process id's of java processes and then issue

kill PROCESS_ID

command

Solution 4

If you want a script to find and kill your (specific) running program using a pattern from the command line of the program (and not just every java thing you got running), then:

pgrep -f pattern # shows the PID
pkill -f pattern

From https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/31111/249209

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Comments

[Admin]

look at your process table (via top or ps) and choose the right one and kill it by PID (kill -9 PID_number).

[Admin]

Oh yes, I can see that now. So I just need to kill process with right PID. Thanks a lot

[Admin]

I need to automate this. How to get the PID for the particular program?

[Andrii Karaivanskyi]

If you want to kill ALL java processes by one command ps ax | grep java | grep -v 'grep' | cut -d '?' -f1 | xargs kill -9

[Alexis Wilke]

Those only list themselves on my computer.

[Muhammad Gelbana]

Then, are you sure there are other Java processes running ?!

[Alexis Wilke]

Yes. I had Cassandra or Elassadra running when testing your command.

[cactuschibre]

Perfect. I used ps -fC java to find nameOfYourJavaAplication (in -Dprogram.name)

[Jeff Schaller]

Notice that "pkill" was already mentioned in Marek R's answer of Feb 13 '13