How to stop a bunch of processes on unix fast?

Question

How to stop a bunch of processes on unix fast.

I can use ps/top, kill.

If the number of processes is very large, I use shell script. Are there other ways, only one or two unix commands can do it well ?

Answer 1

My choice is pkill/pgrep

Answer 2

Here's a little on-line bash script I use:

ps auxwww | grep -v grep | grep -i $1 | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

I kills all processes whose name contains the first parameter (case insensitive). The breakdown of each part is:

• ps auxwww prints all processes with very wide "command" field
• grep -v grep is there to exclude itself from the killing
• grep -i $1 matches all lines that contain the first parameter
• awk '{print $2}' grabs all the process ids
• xargs kill -9 kills all the selected processes

Answer 3

Psdoom is really the only way to kill a process. http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/