Kill process when PID is constantly changing

Question

When I issue

ps aux | grep mtp

I get

ubuntu-+ 15934 0.1 0.0 519848 7068 ? Sl 21:13 0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-mtp --spawner :1.9 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/20

So the PID in this case is 15934. But every new time this is run the PID is different. Is there any other way to kill a process other than by PID?

Answer 1

Probably there is a parent process which kills child processes and forks new children. You can use pstree to find the parent process:

pgrep mtp | xargs -i pstree -ps {}

Or alternatively you can use the ppid option of ps:

pgrep mtp | while read line; do ps -p $line -o ppid; done

Then you can kill the parent process

Answer 2

If you wanted to kill a process which is constantly changing, you do so dynamically:

pkill name_of_process

or

kill -kill $(ps -A | grep name_of_process | awk '{print $1}')

Learn more about Kill here: https://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/12/4-ways-to-kill-a-process-kill-killall-pkill-xkill/

Note: The searches performed by grep or sed are case-sensitive, and you'll have to make sure to narrow down a particular process to an unique identifier other than the PID before you can kill it using these examples.

If you wanted to find the parent of that process dynamically you'd do:

ps -o ppid=$(ps -A | grep name_of_process | awk '{print $1}')

From there you could kill the parent process, since you have its PPID.

If you cannot kill the parent process you'd have to resort to the 1st solution. The problem is, sometimes the PID of processes changes faster than you can find it. In that case you may want to use Sed instead of Grep. The 1st example becomes:

kill -kill $(ps -A | sed '/name_of_process/!d' | awk '{print $1}')

In order to speed things furthermore, you may want to hone the ps command returned results by using other flags other -A. Check out the ps man page:

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/ps.1.html

Sometimes, a process keeps on going by the help of a Daemon. See if you can kill that as well.

Two other things you may consider is the terminal associated with the process or the killall command.

https://linoxide.com/linux-command/linux-killall-my-options/

Answer 3

You can use pkill mtp, or kill -9 pidof mtp

Please notice that if there are several mtp processes, both these commands will kill all the mtp processes in the system.

Rami Rosen

Answer 4

I issued

ps aux | grep mtp

which gave me a few mtp related processes and compared with the camera mounted and unmounted to get the specific process

and then

pkill -9 gvfsd-mtp

does the trick.

But I assume the above answer will work as well:)

Answer 5

You can launch a pkill based on the name of the command which started the process (it is the last / 11th column of ps aux output)

sudo pkill -9 -f COMMAND_STARTING_THE_PROCESS*

And since in your case the command that started the process is

/usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-mtp --spawner :1.9 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/20

you can kill all the processes associated with the launch of the script gvfsd-mtp with

sudo pkill -9 -f /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-mtp*

Note: be sure of using sudo!