Kill process by name using Bash?

Question

I've got many java processes running with different jar files. I want to kill on explicit jar file process.

the following command doesn't work successfully:

sudo kill $(ps -ef | grep example.jar | awk '{print $2}')

It finds the correct PID, but can't kill it.

what is the output of `ps -ef | grep example.jar | awk '{print $2}'` — piyushj, Sep 14 '16 at 07:13

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 14 '16 at 07:16

6

Try this:

ps -ef | grep PROCESS | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

kills all pids matching the search term of "PROCESS".

answered Sep 14 '16 at 07:16

piyushj

Try to avoid `kill -9` at least in the first run: [why?](http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/8918/187424) – Dave Grabowski Sep 14 '16 at 07:42
@DawidGrabowski Thanks for the input, so does it mean we should run `kill -15` for the first time? – piyushj Sep 14 '16 at 08:40
Yes, to allow process to exit cleanly. – Dave Grabowski Sep 14 '16 at 17:34
thanks a lot for that one-liner - I ran a script, which is calling itself over and over again, hence there were plenty of the such processes all with the same name. – Zaphod Beeblebrox Feb 27 '23 at 18:02

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 14 '16 at 07:16

you can use killall which allows you to kill processes by name:

killall -ir example.jar

the options:

-i : interactive (asks confirmation for each process whether or not to kill it)
-r : allows you to specify a regex. killall will try to kill all matching.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 14 '16 at 07:18

0

Awk can perform what grep was doing here. This will search for pid of example.jar and then suppress the pid of awk itself.

kill $(ps -eaf |awk '/example.jar/ && !/awk/{print $2}')

answered Sep 14 '16 at 07:18

P....

3 Answers3