How do I kill all screens?

Question

I accidentally created over 1000 screens. How do I kill them all with one command? (Or a few)

run --> screen -ls | grep Detached | cut -d. -f1 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill — sactiw, Nov 12 '16 at 10:26
Good idea @sactiw. I modified it to work with my named sessions, and tweaked the commands a bit for preference, cleaning the sessions out completely in case they are 'stuck' like they were for me, and listing again for the user as a sanity check: screen -ls | grep "<name>" | cut -d. -f1 | tr --delete "\t" | xargs kill -9; screen -wipe; screen -ls; — Pysis, Aug 09 '17 at 14:37
I was using a loop and running different parameters for a model in each screen. It all happened so fast! — Adam_G, Aug 17 '22 at 21:56

score 171 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 07 '17 at 16:22

171

You can use :

pkill screen

Or

killall screen

In OSX the process is called SCREEN in all caps. So, use:

pkill SCREEN

Or

killall SCREEN

edited Sep 07 '17 at 16:22

Stephen Rauch

4,239

answered Oct 10 '13 at 22:03

Rahul Patil

24,711

2

It's not recommended to use SIGKILL in this case. SIGTERM would be a much better choice. – Marco Oct 10 '13 at 22:31
Hi, Rahul Patil. why screen is not listed in Top – user15964 Apr 30 '16 at 01:03
What if I don't have permissions? Do I have to manually go into and exit all the screens individually? – hipoglucido Jun 21 '17 at 15:39
In OSX (also potentially in Linux), ongoing processes running inside the screen are "orphaned". – f01 Dec 06 '22 at 03:26

score 18 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 02 '14 at 02:20

18

If the screens are dead, use:

screen -wipe

answered Dec 02 '14 at 02:20

Adam_G

413

score 13 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 25 '17 at 14:35

Have recently begun to familiarize myself with awk I put together this and it served its purpose. I posted it since its quite easy to understand.

screen -ls | grep '(Detached)' | awk 'sys {screen -S $1 -X quit}'

Where screen -ls lists all current screens. grep 'pattern' filters out all matching rows. We can then get a handle for all detached screens and with awk sys {command} we can copy and paste together a command and execute it with sys, $1 refers to the first argument picked up by awk. Finally we execute the quit command with screen -X quit.

screen -ls | grep '(Detached)' | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -I % -t screen -X -S % quit
worked better for me. — whereisalext, Sep 22 '19 at 23:24

score 7 · Answer 4 · edited Sep 03 '15 at 14:47

7

str=$(screen -ls)  

array=$(echo $str|tr "." "\n")  

for V in $array  
do  
if [ $V -gt 0  ]  
        then screen -S $V -X quit  
fi  
done

edited Sep 03 '15 at 14:47

Archemar

31,554

answered Sep 03 '15 at 14:39

Don Wei

71

score 5 · Answer 5 · edited Sep 09 '19 at 10:45

5

for scr in $(screen -ls | awk '{print $1}'); do screen -S $scr -X kill; done

edited Sep 09 '19 at 10:45

Jeff Schaller

67,283
35
116
255

answered Sep 09 '19 at 10:22

user370823

51

score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Oct 11 '13 at 00:53

3

I'm a bit puzzled over how you managed to create 1000 "screens". Did you perhaps mean 1000 screen windows (1000 different terminal windows within a single screen session)?

If you meant 1000 windows within a single screen session, then a more elegant solution would be to quit screen using the command C-a \ (ctrl-a followed by \).

answered Oct 11 '13 at 00:53

Railgun2

235

1

Try executing screen 1000x within screen. What happens? You get 1000 screen windows. Yes, that's right, screen intelligently and mercifully doesn't spawn 1000 screen sessions. So if the OP had already started screen it should be far easier to accidentally start 1000 screen windows than to start 1000 screen sessions. – Railgun2 Oct 11 '13 at 01:44
Strange but the comment I was replying to appears to have disappeared. Anyway I'm letting the above comment stand for the record. – Railgun2 Oct 11 '13 at 01:49
1

Well it's actually pretty simple. Just make a infinite loop (by accident) and put something like this in there screen -m sleep 100000. This happened and I did not notice until it had already created over 1000 screen sessions. – BrainStone Oct 11 '13 at 10:14
How exactly does one create an infinite loop by accident? – ahron Jul 04 '22 at 18:13

score 1 · Answer 7 · edited Jun 11 '19 at 09:43

1

The following command will terminate all inactive screens:

perl -e 'while (map { kill 9, [split /\./]->[0] } grep { /Detached/ } split /\n/, qx{screen -ls}) { sleep 1 } exec qw(screen -wipe)'

edited Jun 11 '19 at 09:43

Kevdog777

3,224

answered Jun 11 '19 at 09:04

Michael Vu

11

This one works. – WestCoastProjects Feb 18 '20 at 18:40

score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Aug 11 '23 at 03:11

You can use the screen command itself to list all active screen sessions and then kill them one by one. Here's an example:

screen -ls | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -I{} screen -X -S {} quit

This will list all active screen sessions using the screen -ls command, extract the session IDs using awk, and then pass each session ID to the screen -X -S command to quit the session.

How do I kill all screens?

8 Answers8