killall
sends a signal to all processes running any of the specified commands. If no
signal name is specified, SIGTERM is sent.
Signals can be specified either by name (e.g. -HUP) or by number
(e.g. -1) or by option -s.
If the command name is not regular expression (option -r)
and contains a slash (/), processes executing that
particular file will be selected for killing, independent of their name.
killall returns a zero return code if at least one process has been
killed for each listed command, or no commands were listed and at least
one process matched the -u and -Z search criteria. killall returns
non-zero otherwise.
A killall process never kills itself (but may kill other killall
processes).
OPTIONS
-e, --exact
Require an exact match for very long names. If a command name is longer
than 15 characters, the full name may be unavailable (i.e. it is swapped
out). In this case, killall will kill everything that matches within
the first 15 characters. With -e, such entries are skipped.
killall prints a message for each skipped entry
if -v is specified in addition to -e,
-I, --ignore-case
Do case insensitive process name match.
-g, --process-group
Kill the process group to which the process belongs. The kill signal is only
sent once per group, even if multiple processes belonging to the same process
group were found.
-i, --interactive
Interactively ask for confirmation before killing.
-l, --list
List all known signal names.
-q, --quiet
Do not complain if no processes were killed.
-r, --regexp
Interpret process name pattern as an extended regular expression.
-s, --signal
Send this signal instead of SIGTERM.
-u, --user
Kill only processes the specified user owns. Command names are optional.
-v, --verbose
Report if the signal was successfully sent.
-V, --version
Display version information.
-w, --wait
Wait for all killed processes to die. killall checks once per second if
any of the killed processes still exist and only returns if none are left.
Note that killall may wait forever if the signal was ignored, had no
effect, or if the process stays in zombie state.
-Z, --context
(SELinux Only) Specify security context: kill only processes having security
context that match with given expended regular expression pattern. Must precede
other arguments on the command line. Command names are optional.
FILES
/proc location of the proc file system
KNOWN BUGS
Killing by file only works for executables that are kept open during
execution, i.e. impure executables can't be killed this way.
Be warned that typing killallname may not have the desired
effect on non-Linux systems, especially when done by a privileged
user.
killall -w doesn't detect if a process disappears and is replaced by
a new process with the same PID between scans.
If processes change their name, killall may not be able to match
them correctly.
