How to Force Kill a Screen Session Linux?
The multiplexer of the terminal is known as the screen. Every Linux user uses various tools to perform actions in the Linux operating system. Sometimes users can face some glitches and bugs that can clog the system screen, making it hard to close the software. Linux operating systems give the facility to force kill the screen session.
This article will demonstrate how to kill the created screen session in Linux.
How is the Screen Session killed in Linux?
In some scenarios, the user must create more than one terminal session. The benefit of using the screen is if the user disconnects or accidentally closes the current screen session, it will still run the process in the screen session. Let’s understand the method to force kill the screen session:
Syntax:
$ screen -X -S [session number] kill
Step 1: Listing a Screen Session
To list the created screen session in the Linux operating system, use the below-given command:
The screen session will be listed. In our case, we have two screen sessions, “session_1” and “session_2”.
Step 2: Force killing a Screen Session
To kill a screen session in Linux, use the created session ID and then type the “kill” in the below command:
The screen session will be killed.
Note: The “kill” option will kill the 1-screen window.
Step 3 (Optional): Quitting a Screen Session
To quit the entire screen session in Linux, give the session ID and type the “quit” at the end:
The whole screen session will be closed.
Bonus Tip: How To Attach and Kill the Screen Session in Linux?
To attach and kill the created screen in Linux, use the “r” flag with the screen command and the screen session with its ID:
After typing the command, press the enter button, and it will take you to the created screen session.
Type the exit command and press Enter:
Doing this, you will be exited from the current screen session, and the terminating message will be displayed:
The screen session has been terminated, as shown in the above image.
Conclusion
To force kill the screen session in Linux, use the “kill” option in the “screen -X -S [session_ID] kill” in the command or use “quit” to quit the entire screen session. This write-up has illustrated the methods to force kill the screen session in Linux. Apart from this, the method to attach and kill the screen session has also been demonstrated in this blog.
How to stop a screen process in linux?
I am running a script on a remote server. I ran the script in screen , however I need to stop it before it completes since I need to update the script. I can easily detach from screen , however, is there a way to kill a screen process?
Do you really want to kill screen(1) ? Or would you rather kill the process you started inside screen(1) ?
5 Answers 5
CTRL+a and then ‘k’ will kill a screen session.
Thank you! I just added a Terminal Hotkey that goes «\001ky» (Ctrl-A, k and y for «yes»). On a far note, I have a hotkey bound to the «Home» key that goes «cd ~/ Enter» 😆 There’s no place like cd ~/
There are a couple of ‘screen’ ways to kill a specific screen session from the command line (non-interactively).
screen -X -S "sessionname" quit 2) send a Ctrl-C to a screen session running a script:
screen -X -S "sessionname" stuff "^C" In both cases, you would need to use ‘screen -ls’ to find the session name of the screen session you want to kill . if there is only one screen session running, you won’t need to specify the -S «sessionname» parameter.
I used this to quit hundreds of erroneous screen sessions created by a buggy command:
for s in $(screen -ls|grep -o -P «1\d+.tty»); do screen -X -S $s quit; done;
where: the grep -o -P «1\d+.tty» is the command to get session names with Perl-like name regex «1\d+.tty» which captures all sessions start with number 1 , has some other numbers ( \d ) and end with .tty
Warning: You should test with this command first to see you get the exact list of sessions you want before apply the above command. This is to avoid quitting unwanted sessions:
for s in $(screen -ls|grep -o -P «1\d+.tty»); do echo $s; done;
I always to this echo test whenever the list in for loop is not clear, for example, the one generated by sub-command in $() expansion.
Kill detached screen session [closed]
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screen -X -S [session # you want to kill] kill 11 Answers 11
«kill» will only kill one screen window. To «kill» the complete session, use quit .
Example
$ screen -X -S [session # you want to kill] quit For dead sessions use: $ screen -wipe
You can kill a detached session which is not responding within the screen session by doing the following.
- Type screen -list to identify the detached screen session.
~$ screen -list There are screens on: 20751.Melvin_Peter_V42 (Detached)
screen -r 20751.Melvin_Peter_V42
@laffuste ‘s comment worked for me, but quit and :quit lead to command not found on my remote Linux server (perhaps differences between versions of the OS or screen are to blame)
List screens:
There is a screen on: 23536.pts-0.wdzee (10/04/2012 08:40:45 AM) (Detached) 1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-root. Kill screen session:
It’s easier to kill a session, when some meaningful name is given:
//Creation: screen -S some_name proc // Kill detached session screen -S some_name -X quit This answer uses the name of the session, which is way more convenient than looking up the ID. Thank You!
You can just go to the place where the screen session is housed and run:
There is a screen on: 26727.pts-0.devxxx (Attached) 1 Socket in /tmp/uscreens/S-xxx. The uscreens directory will not have the 26727.pts-0.devxxx file in it anymore. Now to make sure just type this:
No Sockets found in /tmp/uscreens/S-xxx.
This is the only solution that will work if the screen is "stuck", ie. not dead, but cannot be attached to.
This helped me when the screen was utterly locked, but I did need to find and kill the actual process as well. ps aux | grep screen found the pid and I issued a kill to remove it. Depending on what you had running in your screen, you may have temp files and locks to clean up as well.
Should clean all dead screen sessions.
@ShihaoXu Dead means the session is unreachable and on localhost (socket connection is broken). - see gnu.org/software/screen/manual/screen.html
alias cleanscreen="screen -ls | tail -n +2 | head -n -2 | awk ''| xargs -I<> screen -S <> -X quit" Then use cleanscreen to clean all screen session.
A simple one-liner: screen -ls | grep Detached | cut -d. -f1 | awk '
Worked a treat, but had to modify it slightly to work on OSX: screen -ls | tail +2 | head -2 | awk '
Slight improvement:-screen -ls | grep Attached | cut -d. -f1 | awk '
works. This is from within the screen session.
To kill all detached screen sessions, include this function in your .bash_profile:
killd () < for session in $(screen -ls | grep -o '2\') do screen -S "$" -X quit; done > == ISSUE THIS COMMAND [xxx@devxxx ~]$ screen -ls == SCREEN RESPONDS There are screens on: 23487.pts-0.devxxx (Detached) 26727.pts-0.devxxx (Attached) 2 Sockets in /tmp/uscreens/S-xxx. == NOW KILL THE ONE YOU DONT WANT [xxx@devxxx ~]$ screen -X -S 23487.pts-0.devxxx kill == WANT PROOF? [xxx@devxxx ~]$ screen -ls There is a screen on: 26727.pts-0.devxxx (Attached) 1 Socket in /tmp/uscreens/S-xxx.