Is there a reliable way to kill all the processes of a given user? kill(-1, SIGKILL) as that user will work, unless a rogue process of that user kills the killing process first. The best I can find so far is to loop through system("ps -u") for that user and kill the processes that way, but that seems really hacky and inefficient.
EDIT: To clarify, I'm specifically asking for a POSIX-compatable solution. For some reason I thought tagging the question posix would put that in the title.
5 Answers
Just (temporarily) killed my Macbook with
killall -u pu -m .
where pu is my userid. Watch the dot at the end of the command.
Also try
pkill -u pu
or
ps -o pid -u pu | xargs kill -1
Here is a one liner that does this, just replace username with the username you want to kill things for. Don't even think on putting root there!
pkill -9 -u `id -u username`
Note: if you want to be nice remove -9, but it will not kill all kinds of processes.
On Debian LINUX, I use: ps -o pid= -u username | xargs sudo kill -9.
With -o pid= the ps header is supressed, and the output is only the pid list. As far as I know, Debian shell is POSIX compliant.
The following kills all the processes created by this user:
kill -9 -1
What about iterating on the /proc virtual file system ? ?
