KILLALL(1) BSD General Commands Manual KILLALL(1)

NAME

killall — kill processes by name

SYNOPSIS

killall [−delmsvz] [−help] [−u user] [−t tty] [−c procname] [−SIGNAL] [procname ...]

DESCRIPTION

The killall utility kills processes selected by name, as opposed to the selection by pid as done by kill(1). By default, it will send a TERM signal to all processes with a real UID identical to the caller of killall that match the name procname. The super-user is allowed to kill any process.

The options are as follows:

−v

Be more verbose about what will be done.

−e

Use the effective user ID instead of the (default) real user ID for matching processes specified with the −u option.

−help

Give a help on the command usage and exit.

−l

List the names of the available signals and exit, like in kill(1).

−m

Match the argument procname as a (case sensitive) regular expression against the names of processes found. CAUTION! This is dangerous, a single dot will match any process running under the real UID of the caller.

−s

Show only what would be done, but do not send any signal.

−d

Print detailed information about the processes matched, but do not send any signal.

−SIGNAL

Send a different signal instead of the default TERM. The signal may be specified either as a name (with or without a leading SIG), or numerically.

−u user

Limit potentially matching processes to those belonging to the specified user.

−t tty

Limit potentially matching processes to those running on the specified tty.

−c procname

When used with the −u or −t flags, limit potentially matching processes to those matching the specified procname.

−z

Do not skip zombies. This should not have any effect except to print a few error messages if there are zombie processes that match the specified pattern.

ALL PROCESSES

Sending a signal to all processes with uid XYZ is already supported by kill(1). So use kill(1) for this job (e.g. $ kill -TERM -1 or as root $ echo kill -TERM -1 | su -m <user>)

EXIT STATUS

The killall command will respond with a short usage message and exit with a status of 2 in case of a command error. A status of 1 will be returned if either no matching process has been found or not all processes have been signalled successfully. Otherwise, a status of 0 will be returned.

DIAGNOSTICS

Diagnostic messages will only be printed if requested by −d options.

SEE ALSO

kill(1), sysctl(3)

HISTORY

The killall command appeared in FreeBSD 2.1. It has been modeled after the killall command as available on other platforms.

AUTHORS

The killall program was originally written in Perl and was contributed by Wolfram Schneider, this manual page has been written by Jörg Wunsch. The current version of killall was rewritten in C by Peter Wemm using sysctl(3).

BSD January 26, 2004 BSD