How to kill all jobs in bash?

Question

So, I have some jobs like this:

sleep 30 | sleep 30 &

The natural way to think would be:

kill `jobs -p`

But that kills only the first sleep but not the second.

Doing this kills both processes:

kill %1

But that only kills at most one job if there are a lot of such jobs running.

It shouldn't kill processes with the same name but not run in this shell.

What do you do after running sleep 30 | sleep 30? Do you press Control-z and do bg? — Arkadiusz Drabczyk, Aug 02 '17 at 17:31

score 12 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 02 '17 at 21:18

12

A somewhat shorter version of xhienne's answer, but not pure-bash:

jobs -p | xargs -I{} kill -- -{}

answered Aug 02 '17 at 21:18

sduthil

359

"not pure-bash"; which part is not bash? – user5359531 Apr 03 '20 at 15:12
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xargs is not part of bash. It's part of findutils. – sduthil Apr 06 '20 at 13:01
If brevity is desired, then I believe this is equivalent to jobs -p | xargs -i kill -- -{} – Jonathan Hartley Jan 17 '23 at 04:12
True, although -i is documented as deprecated. – sduthil Jan 19 '23 at 20:12

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 02 '17 at 20:22

7

Use this:

pids=( $(jobs -p) )
[ -n "$pids" ] && kill -- "${pids[@]/#/-}"

jobs -p prints the PID of process group leaders. By providing a negative PID to kill, we kill all the processes belonging to that process group (man 2 kill). "${pids[@]/#/-}" just negates each PID stored in array pids.

answered Aug 02 '17 at 20:22

xhienne

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I couldn't get this to work in Ubu 20.04. (kill complained about negitave PID numnbers.). However, this works: while [ -n "$(jobs -p)" ]; do kill %%; done – jpaugh Mar 01 '21 at 05:39
@jpaugh I don't have U20.4. What you describe would be a bug to report to Bash, since negative PIDs are a property of the kill(2) system call and are part of the POSIX standard. Are you sure you copied-pasted my code correctly? What is your version of Bash? You can adapt my code to /bin/kill if Bash's kill is buggy (but IMO this is very unlikely). – xhienne Mar 01 '21 at 10:23
I tried both kill and /usr/bin/kill; While I may have gotten the code wrong, I did verify the format of the PIDs before passing them to kill. I'm not going to look into this further, but hopefully this convo will help someone else. – jpaugh Mar 02 '21 at 17:31
For the reference, can you please add here the error messages produced by both Bash's builtin kill and /bin/kill when given a (valid) negative PID number? (/usr/bin/kill is surprising, you probably mean /bin/kill) – xhienne Mar 02 '21 at 18:06
No, I used /usr/bin/kill. It's probably a symlink to /bin/kill (Ubuntu). I'll try to remember to re-run it when I'm in front of a linux box. – jpaugh Mar 02 '21 at 20:15

user2497 · Answer 3 · 2019-01-31T19:40:11.520

3

Use kill $( jobs -p )... I love it. Use this if you’ve jost got too many jobs for kill’s argv (it can happen I guess):

killalljobs() { for pid in $( jobs -p ); do kill -9 $pid ; done ; }

edited Jan 31 '19 at 19:40

answered Mar 19 '18 at 10:12

user2497

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or simply use pkill -s0 as shown here – Jan 31 '19 at 23:16
@mosvy But what about less feature-rich environments, where no pkill/pgrep pair exists? – user2497 Jan 31 '19 at 23:22
there you'll have to do it by hand ;-) – Jan 31 '19 at 23:36
@mosvy and in a real hurry:/ – user2497 Jan 31 '19 at 23:41
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Notice that kill $(jobs -p) will only kill process leaders ie. it won't kill the sleep in (sleep 3600 &) or (sleep 3600; true) &. That may or may not be what you want. Also busybox has pgrep but no pkill, so kill $(pgrep -s0). – Jan 31 '19 at 23:44
... and negating the pids as in the accepted answer will do the 2nd sleep in, but not the 1st. – Feb 01 '19 at 00:02
@mosvy This also murders the active session, how do you avoid that? – user2497 Feb 24 '19 at 14:09
will it? shells with job control are usually catching SIGTERM. – Feb 24 '19 at 17:48
@mosvy what shell are you using? – user2497 Feb 26 '19 at 22:55
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any interactive shell -- the standard requires that any interactive shell ignore the SIGQUIT and SIGTERM signals. – Feb 27 '19 at 08:27
@mosvy Yes of course, you’re right. I had written kill -9 $(pgrep -s0) in my panicohnooverload() shell function:/ – user2497 Feb 27 '19 at 08:30

Chen A. · Answer 4 · 2017-08-02T17:57:04.063

You can use pkill and pgrep to kill a list of process names.

From the man page:

pgrep looks through the currently running processes and lists the process IDs which matches the selection criteria to stdout. All the criteria have to match. For example, pgrep -u root sshd will only list the processes called sshd AND owned by root. On the other hand, pgrep -u root,daemon will list the processes owned by root OR daemon. pkill will send the specified signal (by default SIGTERM) to each process instead of listing them on stdout.

An example using pgrep, pkill,

$ pgrep -l script.sh
12406 script.sh
12425 script.sh

$ pkill $(pgrep script.sh)

$ cat signal-log
Name: ./script.sh Pid: 12406 Signal Received: SIGTERM
Name: ./script.sh Pid: 12425 Signal Received: SIGTERM

Tom Hale · Answer 5 · 2019-09-28T07:17:45.053

2

This will kill all jobs, most recently created first:

while kill %%; do :; done

This stops when there are no more jobs to kill, and prints:

bash: kill: %%: no such job

Works in zsh too.

edited Sep 28 '19 at 07:17

answered Sep 28 '19 at 07:10

Tom Hale

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Or more exactly, it works only in zsh, not sh or bash. – user23013 Sep 28 '19 at 23:06
Combined with the accepted answer, this becomes while [ -n "$(jobs -p)" ]; do kill %%; done. Prob slower, but no extraneous error message. – jpaugh Mar 01 '21 at 05:41
Works fine for me with bash 4.4.20. – href_ Aug 18 '22 at 13:15

How to kill all jobs in bash?

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