Killall

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killall is a command line utility initially written for use with the GNU/Linux operating systems. It sends a signal, like kill, to all the named process. It sends the signal specified on the command line (SIGTERM by default) and it cannot kill itself. The equivalent Solaris command is pkill.

Common use:

$ killall <option> processname ...

Some usage examples:

Interactive kill the acroread process

$ killall -i acroread

Quietly kill the acroread process (does not complain if the process doesn't exist)

$ killall -q acroread

List all signals

$ killall -l

Send the USR1 signal to the acroread process

killall -s USR1 acroread

Kill the procces using -9 when it is refusing to die

killall -9 acroread

-9 is an option for killall, it says "killall, use SIGKILL, not SIGINT" SIGKILL cannot be caught by the program, SIGINT can (so the process can clean up after itself).

[edit] See also

• List of Unix programs
• Signals

[edit] External links

• killall(1): kill processes by name – Linux man page on usr-share-man.org

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