Does kill command kill processes specific to a path in linux - linux

I have seen many discussions here on kill command. But my confusion is different. I have many processes with the same name and I have to automate the killing. Hence I can't use the pid. So is it possible that if I go to a specific path and use kill <pname> then only the process related to that path will get killed?
Or is there some way to incorporate the path name in kill command?

Instead of using a pid, you could always use the pkill command and have it check against some regular expression. If you pass it the -f flag, it allows you to check against the entire command line rather than just the process name.
Something like this would probably do the trick:
pkill -TERM -u username -f "mwhome.*weblogic\\.NodeManager"
-f is where you would pass in your regex
-u is also useful so that you only affect pid's running as specific users

No, but you when you start the process with
yourcommand & echo $!
or wrap it in a small script
#!/bin/bash
yourcommand &
echo $! >/path/to/pid.file
you can save the pid. And then kill the process with this pid. This is the normal way how to manage the processes. If you look in the normal init.d scripts of perhaps nginx, they do it the same way. Just saving the pid in a file, and at stopping just read the pid and kill the process.

Related

Fetching pid and using it for kill

I have a batch file in linux (which I will execute externally from within my lazarus application). What it should do is read a process PID, store it in a variable, and use that variable to execute the "kill" command.
This is how I'm doing it:
PID=`pidof myProcess`
kill $PID
However, the kill command fails with a ": arguments must be process or job IDs" error.
How can I achieve this?
Perhaps using pkill directly would better suit your needs.
pkill myProcess
More info on pkill here: https://www.lifewire.com/list-and-kill-processes-using-the-pgrep-and-pkill-4065112

bash setsid nohup ./prog & -- $! not pointed at child process

I was trying to get pid of process I ran with setsid and which ought to run in background like this:
test.sh:
#/bin/bash
setsid nohup ./my_program &
echo $!
if I run ./test.sh it will print a pid of my_program process and it's exactly what I need. But if run this commands one by one in my shell like this:
$ setsid nohup ./my_program &
$ echo $!
It will give me a pid of setsid command (or may be something else, but it almost all times gives me pid of my_program minus one).
What is happening here? Why results of commands I ran in terminal by myself differs from results of test.sh script?
Btw, may be you know some easy way of process which I started with setsid and which I need to run in background?
Repost of comments above as an answer:
This is because setsid only forks the current process if it is the process group leader. A detailed explanation can be found here.
To get the pid of a process executed via setsid, the approaches given here may be tried.
setsid will call fork to ensure that it creates a new process group aswell as a new session, hence the resulting pid will not match the pid of setsid. The most clean work-around would be that my_program stores its pid into a file.
When you later want to send kill to my_program, you should check that the pid actually matches a program named my_program via /proc file system or calling the ps command with some magic code around it. (This is a very common method used by many daemons)

Prevent process from killing itself using pkill

I'm writing a stop routine for a start-up service script:
do_stop()
{
rm -f $PIDFILE
pkill -f $DAEMON || return 1
return 0
}
The problem is that pkill (same with killall) also matches the process representing the script itself and it basically terminates itself. How to fix that?
You can explicitly filter out the current PID from the results:
kill $(pgrep -f $DAEMON | grep -v ^$$\$)
To correctly use the -f flag, be sure to supply the whole path to the daemon rather than just a substring. That will prevent you from killing the script (and eliminate the need for the above grep) and also from killing all other system processes that happen to share the daemon's name.
pkill -f accepts a full blown regex. So rather than pkill -f $DAEMON you should use:
pkill -f "^"$DAEMON
To make sure only if process name starts with the given daemon name then only it is killed.
A better solution will be to save pid (Proces Id) of the process in a file when you start the process. And for the stopping the process just read the file to get the process id to be stopped/killed.
Judging by your question, you're not hard over on using pgrep and pkill, so here are some other options commonly used.
1) Use killproc from /etc/init.d/functions or /lib/lsb/init-functions (which ever is appropriate for your distribution and version of linux). If you're writing a service script, you may already be including this file if you used one of the other services as an example.
Usage: killproc [-p pidfile] [ -d delay] {program} [-signal]
The main advantage to using this is that it sends SIGTERM, waits to see if the process terminates and sends SIGKILL only if necessary.
2) You can also use the secret sauce of killproc, which is to find the process ids to kill using pidof which has a -o option for excluding a particular process. The argument for -o could be $$, the current process id, or %PPID, which is a special variable that pidof interprets as the script calling pidof. Finally if the daemon is a script, you'll need the -x so your trying to kill the script by it's name rather than killing bash or python.
for pid in $(pidof -o %PPID -x progd); do
kill -TERM $pid
done
You can see an example of this in the article Bash: How to check if your script is already running

Killing processes automatically - linux

I al running this command :
pgrep -l someprocess
I get some outputs XXXX someprocess
then I kill every process appearing by hand, I would like to write a script to do it automatically, but this doesn(t make sense
kill -9 $(pgrep -l someprocess | grep "^[0-9]{4}")
someone could help ?
You can use either pkill or killall to accomplish exactly that.
I found this short and clear summary explaining the different ways of killing processes.
pkill is as simple as: pkill someprocess.
#ewm already included a detailed explanation about killall in his answer, so I'm not repeating it here.
You might want to look at the 'killall' command:
KILLALL(1) User Commands KILLALL(1)
NAME
killall - kill processes by name
SYNOPSIS
killall [-Z,--context pattern] [-e,--exact] [-g,--process-group] [-i,--interactive] [-q,--quiet]
[-r,--regexp] [-s,--signal signal] [-u,--user user] [-v,--verbose] [-w,--wait] [-I,--ignore-case]
[-V,--version] [--] name ...
killall -l
killall -V,--version
DESCRIPTION
killall sends a signal to all processes running any of the specified commands. If no signal name is
specified, SIGTERM is sent.
Signals can be specified either by name (e.g. -HUP or -SIGHUP ) or by number (e.g. -1) or by option
-s.
If the command name is not regular expression (option -r) and contains a slash (/), processes execut-
ing that particular file will be selected for killing, independent of their name.
killall returns a zero return code if at least one process has been killed for each listed command,
or no commands were listed and at least one process matched the -u and -Z search criteria. killall
returns non-zero otherwise.
A killall process never kills itself (but may kill other killall processes).

Start a process with a name

Basically I want to dynamically start some processes which may create their own children processes, also I want to kill a certain group of processes I just created whenever I want. One way I could think of is to start processes with a name(to distinguish as a group), then use pkill to kill them by the name. The question is how to start a process with a name so that I can use pkill to kill them by the name? I am open to other solutions as well.
How can I start a process with a different name?
bash -c "exec -a <MyProcessName> <Command>"
Then you can kill the process with:
pkill -f MyProcessName

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