Killing multiple GNU screen sessions with the same name

Question

Sometimes my script bugs out and multiple screen sessions with the same name get created. Is there a way to kill all of these with this name in one command?

Rx:/scripts# screen -S haydoz-script -X quit
There are several suitable screens on:
        13372.haydoz-script     (09/10/11 07:44:05)     (Detached)
        12287.haydoz-script     (09/10/11 07:30:45)     (Detached)
        12230.haydoz-script     (09/10/11 07:17:42)     (Detached)
        7824.haydoz-script      (09/09/11 11:42:26)     (Detached)
        7764.haydoz-script      (09/09/11 11:35:40)     (Detached)
        15753.haydoz-script     (09/04/11 15:00:27)     (Detached)
        15744.haydoz-script     (09/04/11 15:00:26)     (Detached)

There are other screens running besides these ones that I do not want to kill.

Answer 1

If there are no other screen sessions running you can use the "hard" way and just kill them with killall screen.

If you want to be nice you can iterate over your list of screen sessions and kill them one after another:

# screen -S foo && screen -S foo
[detached]
[detached]
# screen -ls
There are screens on:                                                                                                                                                                                      
        8350.foo        (Detached)                                                                                                                                                                         
        8292.foo        (Detached)                                                                                                                                                                         
2 Sockets in /tmp/screens/S-joschi.                                                                                                                                                                        

# This is the interesting line. Just replace "foo" with the name of your session(s)
# for session in $(screen -ls | grep -o '[0-9]*\.foo'); do screen -S "${session}" -X quit; done
# screen -ls
No Sockets found in /tmp/screens/S-joschi.

Answer 2

screen -ls "$SESSION_NAME" lists the full names of matching sessions on tab-indented lines. So you can iterate on these lines, extract the full names, and call the quit command on each matching name.

SESSION_NAME='haydoz-script'
screen -ls "$SESSION_NAME" | (
  IFS=$(printf '\t');
  sed "s/^$IFS//" |
  while read -r name stuff; do
      screen -S "$name" -X quit
  done
)