How can I kill process by specific name and exclude root processes

Question

Not a long time ago we found out about pkill and we had in mind to start using it in a setuid (for root) script for global clean-up of processes. This could save us lots of stupid maintenance where some clients can´t remove general resources using their scripts only due not important permission limitations.

However, after some struggling we only came up with pkill -v -u root <name> (so far we intent to make it simple and prevent from devolving into a long and ugly script with sed,awk,grep and so on). Of course it doesn´t work — it just kills everything but the processes that match the given name.

Is there a any short modified version of that pkill command that get us the results we need?

P.S: I want to avoid any discussions about the morality of giving some sort of root power to the users.

The running OS is solaris 10, if that matters.

Answer 1

This will generate a list of processes with the given name, and a list of processes with the given name running as root, then run comm to find processes in the first list that are not in the second list, then kill them.

#!/bin/ksh
if test $# != 1
then
    echo usage: "$0" processname
    exit 1
fi
pname="$1"
kill $(comm -23 <(pgrep "$pname"|sort -n) <(pgrep -u root "$pname"|sort -n))

Answer 2

I am using SUSE , but assuming it works similar on Solaris.

Kill process for a User

In order to kill a process by its user id You can do following

#pkill -U <username>

Check processes for a User

If you just want to check what processes are running for a particular user before killing his processes, you can use: pgrep -U <username

Kill process for multiple users

#pkill -U <user1>,<user2>,<user3> and so on.

Kill all users except root

I know you are avoiding sed , awk , grep. But its easier to write a script rather than having to type each user name. Here is a sample. Please check on sanbox before executing on production.

ps -aef |grep -v UID |grep -v root |awk '{print $1}' 
 |sort -u |while read name
do 
echo "Killing process for user $name"
pkill -U $name
done