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killall: command not found

by admin

The killall command sends any specified signal, or the default termination signal, to all processes matching the name specified. Similar to pkill but has a few functional differences, such as matching process names exactly. Here is the syntax:

# killall [-u user] [-signal] name...

To demonstrate, we will start a couple of instances of the sleep program and then terminate them.

$ sleep 500 &
[1] 18801
$ sleep 600 &
[2] 18802
$ killall sleep
[1]-  Terminated              sleep
[2]+  Terminated              sleep

Remember, as with kill; you must have superuser privileges to send signals to processes that do not belong to you.

If you encounter the below error while running the killall command:

killall: command not found

you may install the below package as per your choice of distribution:

OS Distribution Command
Debian apt-get install psmisc
Ubuntu apt-get install psmisc
Alpine apk add psmisc
Arch Linux pacman -S psmisc
Kali Linux apt-get install psmisc
CentOS yum install psmisc
Fedora dnf install psmisc
Raspbian apt-get install psmisc

killall Command Examples

1. To kill all the specified commands:

# killall 

2. To list all known signals:

# killall -l
# killall --list

3. Do not complain if no processes were killed:

# killall -q
# killall --quiet 

4. To send the specified signal instead of SIGTERM:

# killall -s 9 bash
# killall --signal 9 bash 

5. To kill processes owned by particular user:

# killall -u mike 

6. To set to verbose mode:

# killall -v
# killall --verbose 

7. To display the version:

# killall -V
# killall --version 

8. To specify to wait for all the killed processes to die:

# killall -w
# killall --wait 

9. To kill processes with specified security context:

# killall -Z
# killall --context 

10. Interactively ask for confirmation before termination:

# killall -i process_name

11. Terminate a process using the SIGINT (interrupt) signal, which is the same signal sent by pressing `Ctrl + C`:

# killall -INT process_name

12. Force kill a process:

# killall -KILL process_name

Conclusion

Commands often used in conjunction with ps are kill and killall. When running ps, we saw that there is a column that displays PID, short for process ID. If a process isn’t running right, hanging, or we just want to end it, one way is using the kill command. Simply pass it the PID, for example, given a PID of 123:

# kill 123

If you want to match the process by name instead of PID, you can use killall, for example, if Firefox was frozen and we wanted to force quit:

# killall firefox

Filed Under: Linux

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