How to kill two or more processes with one kill command?

Question

I am using the following command to kill one java process via shell script:

pidof java|xargs kill -9 $1

What if the list of pidof output has more than one elements? How do I kill them both with the same one command?

Answer 1

First of all, check out pkill. You can kill off any number of process given their name:

pkill java

You can even use the full command with arguments as part of the search

pkill -f some_string_in_arguemnts

Secondly, your construct with xargs will work just fine for multiple PID's as long as they are piped in as either space or newline separated numbers.

Answer 2

The killall command is available on most Linuces at any rate. You might have to install it on some distributions. It allows you to kill all processes that match the name provided on the command line.

Answer 3

pgrep can give you the list of PIDs

For example:

pgrep java 

will give you the list of PIDs related to java. So you can use:

kill -9 `pgrep java`