On Unix-like operating systems, the killall command forcibly terminates processes, specified by name.

This page describes the GNU/Linux version of killall.

Description

killall sends a signal to all processes running any of the specified commands. If no signal name is specified, SIGTERM is sent.

  • Description
  • Syntax
  • Known bugs
  • Examples
  • Related commands
  • Linux commands help

Signals can be specified either by name (e.g., -HUP or -SIGHUP) or by number (e.g., -1) or by option -s.

If the command name is not a regular expression (option -r) and contains a slash (/), processes executing that particular file are selected for killing, independent of their name.

killall returns a zero return code if at least one process was 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.

Syntax

killall [-Z, –context pattern] [-e, –exact] [-g, –process-group] [-i, –interactive] [-o, –older-than TIME] [-q, –quiet] [-r, –regexp] [-s, –signal signal] [-u, –user user] [-v, –verbose] [-w, –wait] [-y, –younger-than TIME] [-I, –ignore-case] [-V, –version] [–] name …

killall -l

killall -V, –version

Options

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 killall name 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.

killall has a limit of names that can be specified on the command line. This figure is the size of an unsigned long multiplied by 8. For most 32 bit systems, the limit is 32, and similarly for a 64 bit system, the limit is usually 64.

Examples

killall UnResponsiveProg

Terminate the process named “UnResponsiveProg”.

killall -I unresponsiveprog

Terminate any process matching the string “unresponsiveprog”, ignoring the difference between upper and lowercase letters.

kill — Send a signal to a process, affecting its behavior or killing it.ps — Report the status of a process or processes.