Bash: kill background jobs

Question

Is there a more compact form of killing background jobs than:

for i in {1..5}; do kill %$i; done

Also, {1..5} obviously has a hard-coded magic number in it, how can I make it "N" with N being the right number, without doing a:

$(jobs | wc -l)

I actually use \j in PS1 to get the # of managed jobs, is this equivalent?

I would prefer to kill jobs individually, if possible. (I might have misunderstood your comment, though)
@jw013 It's not only easier, it's actually correct (please post it as an answer), unlike a solution based on counting the lines of the output of jobs which only works if the jobs happen to be numbered consecutively. Oh, and “kill jobs individually” is meaningless: passing multiple PIDs to the kill command does exactly the same thing as passing them separately.
I was entering the command incorrectly, kill $(jobs -p) words and looks very correct to me too. Ready to accept.

jw013 · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-24 15:38:36Z

up vote 3 down vote accepted

To just kill all background jobs managed by bash, do

kill $(jobs -p)

Note that since both jobs and kill are built into bash, you shouldn't run into any errors of the Argument list too long type.

edited Jul 24 '12 at 15:38

answered Jul 22 '12 at 16:19

jw013
15.8k12753

2

For posterity, with zsh it would be jobs -p | awk '{print $3}' | xargs kill. ZSH isn't better at everything. – bahamat Jul 22 '12 at 18:54

Also for posterity, what bahamat thinks is the way to do it in zsh disqualifies them as any authority on the topic. – user112553 Mar 8 at 23:46

1 Answer