I accidentally created over 1000 screens. How do I kill them all with one command? (Or a few)
asked Oct 10, 2013 at 21:57
7 Answers
You can use :
pkill screen
Or
killall screen
In OSX the process is called SCREEN in all caps. So, use:
pkill SCREEN
Or
killall SCREEN
answered Oct 10, 2013 at 22:03
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2It's not recommended to use SIGKILL in this case. SIGTERM would be a much better choice.– MarcoOct 10, 2013 at 22:31
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What if I don't have permissions? Do I have to manually go into and exit all the screens individually? Jun 21, 2017 at 15:39
If the screens are dead, use:
screen -wipe
Have recently begun to familiarize myself with awk I put together this and it served its purpose. I posted it since its quite easy to understand.
screen -ls | grep '(Detached)' | awk 'sys {screen -S $1 -X quit}'
Where screen -ls lists all current screens.
grep 'pattern' filters out all matching rows. We can then get a handle for all detached screens and with awk sys {command} we can copy and paste together a command and execute it with sys, $1 refers to the first argument picked up by awk. Finally we execute the quit command with screen -X quit.
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7
screen -ls | grep '(Detached)' | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -I % -t screen -X -S % quitworked better for me. Sep 22, 2019 at 23:24
str=$(screen -ls)
array=$(echo $str|tr "." "\n")
for V in $array
do
if [ $V -gt 0 ]
then screen -S $V -X quit
fi
done
for scr in $(screen -ls | awk '{print $1}'); do screen -S $scr -X kill; done
I'm a bit puzzled over how you managed to create 1000 "screens". Did you perhaps mean 1000 screen windows (1000 different terminal windows within a single screen session)?
If you meant 1000 windows within a single screen session, then a more elegant solution would be to quit screen using the command C-a \ (ctrl-a followed by \).
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1Try executing screen 1000x within screen. What happens? You get 1000 screen windows. Yes, that's right, screen intelligently and mercifully doesn't spawn 1000 screen sessions. So if the OP had already started screen it should be far easier to accidentally start 1000 screen windows than to start 1000 screen sessions.– Railgun2Oct 11, 2013 at 1:44
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Strange but the comment I was replying to appears to have disappeared. Anyway I'm letting the above comment stand for the record.– Railgun2Oct 11, 2013 at 1:49
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1Well it's actually pretty simple. Just make a infinite loop (by accident) and put something like this in there
screen -m sleep 100000. This happened and I did not notice until it had already created over 1000 screen sessions. Oct 11, 2013 at 10:14
The following command will terminate all inactive screens:
perl -e 'while (map { kill 9, [split /\./]->[0] } grep { /Detached/ } split /\n/, qx{screen -ls}) { sleep 1 } exec qw(screen -wipe)'
screen -ls | grep Detached | cut -d. -f1 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs killscreen -ls | grep "<name>" | cut -d. -f1 | tr --delete "\t" | xargs kill -9; screen -wipe; screen -ls;