- How to kill all jobs in bash?
- 5 Answers 5
- How to Kill All Stopped Jobs in Linux
- 1. Overview
- 2. Killing All Stopped Jobs From the Same Terminal
- 3. Killing All Stopped Jobs From Another Terminal
- 4. Conclusion
- Kill All Stopped Jobs Linux
- Foreground Jobs
- Background Jobs
- How To Manage Background Jobs
- Show jobs with PID
- Background jobs with output
- How to Bring Background Job to Foreground
- Jobs Command Options
- How to Terminate or Kill Jobs
- Kill using job id
- Kill a Job with a substring
- How to Kill Stopped Jobs
- Conclusion
- About the author
- John Otieno
How to kill all jobs in bash?
But that only kills at most one job if there are a lot of such jobs running. It shouldn’t kill processes with the same name but not run in this shell.
5 Answers 5
A somewhat shorter version of xhienne’s answer, but not pure-bash:
pids=( $(jobs -p) ) [ -n "$pids" ] && kill -- "$"
jobs -p prints the PID of process group leaders. By providing a negative PID to kill , we kill all the processes belonging to that process group ( man 2 kill ). «$» just negates each PID stored in array pids .
I couldn’t get this to work in Ubu 20.04. (kill complained about negitave PID numnbers.). However, this works: while [ -n «$(jobs -p)» ]; do kill %%; done
@jpaugh I don’t have U20.4. What you describe would be a bug to report to Bash, since negative PIDs are a property of the kill(2) system call and are part of the POSIX standard. Are you sure you copied-pasted my code correctly? What is your version of Bash? You can adapt my code to /bin/kill if Bash’s kill is buggy (but IMO this is very unlikely).
I tried both kill and /usr/bin/kill ; While I may have gotten the code wrong, I did verify the format of the PIDs before passing them to kill. I’m not going to look into this further, but hopefully this convo will help someone else.
For the reference, can you please add here the error messages produced by both Bash’s builtin kill and /bin/kill when given a (valid) negative PID number? (/usr/bin/kill is surprising, you probably mean /bin/kill)
No, I used /usr/bin/kill. It’s probably a symlink to /bin/kill (Ubuntu). I’ll try to remember to re-run it when I’m in front of a linux box.
Use kill $( jobs -p ) . I love it. Use this if you’ve jost got too many jobs for kill ’s argv (it can happen I guess):
Notice that kill $(jobs -p) will only kill process leaders ie. it won’t kill the sleep in (sleep 3600 &) or (sleep 3600; true) & . That may or may not be what you want. Also busybox has pgrep but no pkill, so kill $(pgrep -s0) .
any interactive shell — the standard requires that any interactive shell ignore the SIGQUIT and SIGTERM signals.
You can use pkill and pgrep to kill a list of process names.
pgrep looks through the currently running processes and lists the process IDs which matches the selection criteria to stdout. All the criteria have to match. For example, pgrep -u root sshd will only list the processes called sshd AND owned by root. On the other hand, pgrep -u root,daemon will list the processes owned by root OR daemon. pkill will send the specified signal (by default SIGTERM) to each process instead of listing them on stdout.
An example using pgrep , pkill ,
$ pgrep -l script.sh 12406 script.sh 12425 script.sh $ pkill $(pgrep script.sh) $ cat signal-log Name: ./script.sh Pid: 12406 Signal Received: SIGTERM Name: ./script.sh Pid: 12425 Signal Received: SIGTERM
How to Kill All Stopped Jobs in Linux
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1. Overview
Killing a stopped job or process is not a difficult task. Usually, we just need to call the kill command with the process ID (PID). However, sometimes Linux may hide the processes depending on which terminal launched them and whether they have higher privileges.
In this tutorial, we’ll discuss how to target and kill these processes in different scenarios using several commands.
2. Killing All Stopped Jobs From the Same Terminal
It’s rather easy to kill stopped processes launched from the same terminal. All we need to do is find the process IDs of the jobs and then send the SIGKILL signal to them.
For example, we can use the sleep command to initiate a task that does nothing:
This program will occupy the terminal for 1 minute. After running the command above, we interrupt it using CTRL+Z to send the SIGTSTP signal:
$ sleep 1m ^Z [1]+ Stopped sleep 1m
Now, we have a stopped job. Next, we can use the jobs command to list that job:
Here, we use –p for getting the process ID, while –s filters only for processes that are stopped.
Additionally, we can use the -l parameter instead of -p for a more detailed view of the stopped job:
$ jobs -ls [1]+ 4772 Stopped sleep 1m
The jobs -ls command will show all the stopped jobs launched in this session. Once we find their process IDs, we can use the kill command to stop all of them by providing multiple process IDs to the kill command, or we can directly pipe the jobs command after the kill command like this:
Importantly, it’s best to use the SIGKILL, not the SIGTERM signal, as code can easily catch or block the latter.
3. Killing All Stopped Jobs From Another Terminal
Sometimes we don’t have direct access to the terminal running a particular job. In these cases, it’s convenient to have a mechanism to identify and stop such jobs.
Linux does not let us see a terminal-launched process from another terminal with the jobs command. Because of this, we’ll use the ps command instead.
Let’s create two instances of the previously described process first:
$ tty /dev/pts/0 $ sleep 1m ^Z [1]+ Stopped sleep 1m $ sleep 2m ^Z [2]+ Stopped sleep 1m $ bg [2]+ sleep 2m &
Note the use of tty to show the terminal we’re using. Further, we use bg to ensure that only the first job is stopped while the last one is running in the background.
We can use the ps command in another terminal to see the newly created jobs. In fact, the flags aux ensure we see all processes (a) under the current user (u) with their states (x):
$ tty /dev/pts/1 $ ps aux | grep [s]leep username 5767 0.0 0.0 2364 572 pts/0 T 15:23 0:00 sleep 1m username 5768 0.0 0.0 2364 580 pts/0 S 15:24 0:00 sleep 2m
Of course, we can filter by process name with grep. Furthermore, to identify the correct process, we need to pay attention to the STAT column, holding the current state of a process. Critically, T stands for “stopped by a job control signal”, which means it’s a stopped job of a terminal.
The output above shows that we have stopped process 5767 while process 5768 is still running. Now, we use the awk language to filter only those jobs:
$ tty /dev/pts/1 $ ps aux | awk 5767 T sleep 1m
Above, we only use rows of output, where column 8 ($8, STAT) has a value of T. From those rows, we extract the process ID, STAT, and actual command run via $2″ “$8” “$11. Of course, it’s easy to only print $2 for the PID. This awk expression will show us all the stopped jobs as a list.
Finally, we can kill all processes of interest by piping our output from ps to kill:
$ tty /dev/pts/1 $ kill -9 `ps aux | awk `
We can verify the correct processes have been killed in the original terminal:
$ tty /dev/pts/0 $ jobs [1]+ Killed sleep 1m [2]- Running sleep 2m &
As the jobs command tells us, we have successfully killed only the stopped processes in another terminal.
4. Conclusion
In this article, we briefly covered how to kill all stopped jobs under different circumstances. First, we used the jobs command to identify local terminal processes. After that, we employed ps to help with specific cases.
Kill All Stopped Jobs Linux
In Linux, a job refers to a process started and managed by the shell. That can be a single command, a long and complex shell command including pipes and redirections, an executable, or a script. Each job in Linux is managed by assigning a sequential job IP associated with a specific process.
A key concept to understand about Linux jobs is their statuses. There are two main statuses for Linux jobs:
Foreground Jobs
A foreground job refers to a command or a program executed in the shell and occupies the terminal session until it completes. An example would be launching a file manager or browser in the terminal
For example, the following screenshot shows a terminal window with a foreground job.
In the above image, the shell prompt is unavailable until the Firefox window closes.
Background Jobs
The opposite of foreground is background jobs. To initiate a job in the shell as a background job, we use the ampersand (&) symbol. Using this tells the shell to put whatever commands come before the ampersand in the background and immediately show the shell prompt.
The example below shows how to put the Firefox job (in the above example) in the background.
As you can see, the shell prompt is now available despite Firefox still running.
You will notice numerical values displayed for background jobs. The first one, indicated by square brackets ([]), shows the job ID, while the other value indicates the PID of the process associated with the job.
How To Manage Background Jobs
The jobs command handles job control. This allows you to view the jobs in the background.
Executing the above command shows background jobs as shown below:
Starting on the left side, we have the Job ID.
Following immediately after the brackets is the plus (+) or minus (-) sign. The plus sign indicates this is the current job, while the minus number shows the next job.
The next bracket shows the state of the job. That can be running, stopped, terminated, done, or exit with a status code.
Finally, the last part shows the actual name of the job.
Show jobs with PID
To show background jobs with their corresponding PID values, we use the -l flag as:
That will show the background jobs with their PID values, as shown in the image below.
Background jobs with output
Suppose we have a job that we want to run in the background that dumps an output on the screen. For example, in the above example, I put the apt command, which has a lot of output in the background, without messing up my terminal.
To do this, you can redirect the output in /dev/null as:
How to Bring Background Job to Foreground
We can bring background jobs to the foreground by using the fg command. For example, to bring the firefox job with Job ID of 1 to the background, we can do:
That will bring the job to the foreground as:
Jobs Command Options
The jobs command does not have a lot of options.
We have already discussed the -l to show the jobs with their process IDs.
Other options you can pass to the job command include:
- -n – This shows the jobs that have changed their status since the last notification. For example, a job that has changed from a running to a stopped state.
- -p – Lists only the PIDs of the jobs.
- -r –running jobs only
- -s – Shows only stopped jobs.
How to Terminate or Kill Jobs
We can terminate jobs using the kill command followed by either the job ID, a substring, or the process ID.
Kill using job id
To kill a job with the job ID, we use the % followed by the id value as:
This will kill the current job; this is similar to %+.
Kill a Job with a substring
Killing a job with a substring, prefix the substring with %? followed by the substring value as:
NOTE: Linux executes jobs concurrently. That means it jumps back and forth between available jobs until they complete. Hence, terminating a terminal session with jobs running will terminate all your jobs.
You do not have to worry about this if you use a terminal multiplexer like tmux or screen, as you can reattach them.
How to Kill Stopped Jobs
For us to kill all stopped jobs, we need to tie two commands together. The first will get the PIDs of all stopped jobs, and the next will kill all the jobs provided.
To view the stopped jobs, we use the command
This command shows all the stopped jobs.
Having this, we can get the PIDs of the stopped jobs and pipe them to kill command as:
This will kill all the stopped jobs.
Conclusion
This tutorial went over the concepts of job control in Linux and how to get information about the jobs. It is good to note that job control may not be available depending on your shell of choice.
Thank you for reading & Happy Shells.
About the author
John Otieno
My name is John and am a fellow geek like you. I am passionate about all things computers from Hardware, Operating systems to Programming. My dream is to share my knowledge with the world and help out fellow geeks. Follow my content by subscribing to LinuxHint mailing list