Suppress Notice of Forked Command Being Killed - linux

Let's suppose I have a bash script (foo.sh) that in a very simplified form, looks like the following:
echo "hello"
sleep 100 &
ps ax | grep sleep | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $1 } ' | xargs kill -9
echo "bye"
The third line imitates pkill, which I don't have by default on Mac OS X, but you can think of it as the same as pkill. However, when I run this script, I get the following output:
hello
foo: line 4: 54851 Killed sleep 100
bye
How do I suppress the line in the middle so that all I see is hello and bye?

While disown may have the side effect of silencing the message; this is how you start the process in a way that the message is truly silenced without having to give up job control of the process.
{ command & } 2>/dev/null
If you still want the command's own stderr (just silencing the shell's message on stderr) you'll need to send the process' stderr to the real stderr:
{ command 2>&3 & } 3>&2 2>/dev/null
To learn about how redirection works:
From the BashGuide: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide/TheBasics/InputAndOutput#Redirection
An illustrated tutorial: http://bash-hackers.org/wiki/doku.php/howto/redirection_tutorial
And some more info: http://bash-hackers.org/wiki/doku.php/syntax/redirection
And by the way; don't use kill -9.
I also feel obligated to comment on your:
ps ax | grep sleep | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $1 } ' | xargs kill -9
This will scortch the eyes of any UNIX/Linux user with a clue. Moreover, every time you parse ps, a fairy dies. Do this:
kill $!
Even tools such as pgrep are essentially broken by design. While they do a better job of matching processes, the fundamental flaws are still there:
Race: By the time you get a PID output and parse it back in and use it for something else, the PID might already have disappeared or even replaced by a completely unrelated process.
Responsibility: In the UNIX process model, it is the responsibility of a parent to manage its child, nobody else should. A parent should keep its child's PID if it wants to be able to signal it and only the parent can reliably do so. UNIX kernels have been designed with the assumption that user programs will adhere to this pattern, not violate it.

How about disown? This mostly works for me on Bash on Linux.
echo "hello"
sleep 100 &
disown
ps ax | grep sleep | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $1 } ' | xargs kill -9
echo "bye"
Edit: Matched the poster's code better.

The message is real. The code killed the grep process as well.
Run ps ax | grep sleep and you should see your grep process on the list.
What I usually do in this case is ps ax | grep sleep | grep -v grep
EDIT: This is an answer to older form of question where author omitted the exclusion of grep for the kill sequence. I hope I still get some rep for answering the first half.

Yet another way to disable job termination messages is to put your command to be backgrounded in a sh -c 'cmd &' construct.
And as already pointed out, there is no need to imitate pkill; you may store the value of $! in another variable instead.
echo "hello"
sleep_pid=`sh -c 'sleep 30 & echo ${!}' | head -1`
#sleep_pid=`sh -c '(exec 1>&-; exec sleep 30) & echo ${!}'`
echo kill $sleep_pid
kill $sleep_pid
echo "bye"

Have you tried to deactivate job control? It's a non-interactive shell, so I would guess it's off by default, but it does not hurt to try... It's regulated by the -m (monitor) shell variable.

Related

how can I kill a process in a shell script

My bash script has:
ps aux | grep foo.jar | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill
However, I get the following when running:
usage: kill [ -s signal | -p ] [ -a ] pid ...
kill -l [ signal ]
Any ideas, how to fix this line?
In general, your command is correct. If a foo.jar process is running, its PID will be passed to kill and (should) terminate.
Since you're getting kill's usage as output, it means you're actually calling kill with no arguments (try just running kill on its own, you'll see the same message). That means that there's no output in the pipeline actually reaching xargs, which in turn means foo.jar is not running.
Try running ps aux | grep foo.jar | grep -v grep and see if you're actually seeing results.
As much as you may enjoy a half dozen pipes in your commands, you may want to look at the pkill command!
DESCRIPTION
The pkill command searches the process table on the running system and signals all processes that match the criteria
given on the command line.
i.e.
pkill foo.jar
Untested and a guess at best (be careful)
kill -9 $(ps -aux | grep foo.jar | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}')
I re-iterate UNTESTED as I'm not at work and have no access to putty or Unix.
My theory is to send the kill -9 command and get the process id from a sub shell command call.

Can i wait for a process termination that is not a child of current shell terminal?

I have a script that has to kill a certain number of times a resource managed by a high avialability middelware. It basically checks whether the resource is running and kills it afterwards, i need the timestamp of when the proc is really killed. So i have done this code:
#!/bin/bash
echo "$(date +"%T,%N") :New measures Run" > /home/hassan/logs/measures.log
for i in {1..50}
do
echo "Iteration: $i"
PID=`ps -ef | grep "/home/hassan/Desktop/pcmAppBin pacemaker_app/MainController"|grep -v "grep" | awk {'print$2'}`
if [ -n "$PID" ]; then
echo "$(date +"%T,%N") :Killing $PID" >> /home/hassan/logs/measures.log
ps -ef | grep "/home/hassan/Desktop/pcmAppBin pacemaker_app/MainController"|grep -v "grep" | awk {'print "kill -9 " $2'} | sh
wait $PID
else
PID=`ps -ef | grep "/home/hassan/Desktop/pcmAppBin pacemaker_app/MainController"|grep -v "grep" | awk {'print$2'}`
until [ -n "$PID" ]; do
sleep 2
PID=`ps -ef | grep "/home/hassan/Desktop/pcmAppBin pacemaker_app/MainController"|grep -v "grep" | awk {'print$2'}`
done
fi
done
But with my wait command i get the following error message: wait: pid xxxx is not a child of this shell
I assume that You started the child processes from bash and then start this script to wait for. The problem is that the child processes are not the children of the bash running the script, but the children of its parent!
If You want to launch a script inside the the current bash You should start with ..
An example. You start a vim and then You make is stop pressing ^Z (later you can use fg to get back to vim). Then You can get the list of jobs by using the˙jobs command.
$ jobs
[1]+ Stopped vim myfile
Then You can create a script called test.sh containing just one command, called jobs. Add execute right (e.g. chmod 700 test.sh), then start it:
$ cat test.sh
jobs
~/dev/fi [3:1]$ ./test.sh
~/dev/fi [3:1]$ . ./test.sh
[1]+ Stopped vim myfile
As the first version creates a new bash session no jobs are listed. But using . the script runs in the present bash script having exactly one chold process (namely vim). So launch the script above using the . so no child bash will be created.
Be aware that defining any variables or changing directory (and a lot more) will affect to your environment! E.g. PID will be visible by the calling bash!
Comments:
Do not use ...|grep ...|grep -v ... |awk --- pipe snakes! Use ...|awk... instead!
In most Linux-es you can use something like this ps -o pid= -C pcmAppBin to get just the pid, so the complete pipe can be avoided.
To call an external program from awk you could try system("mycmd"); built-in
I hope this helps a bit!

Bash script optimization for waiting for a particular string in log files

I am using a bash script that calls multiple processes which have to start up in a particular order, and certain actions have to be completed (they then print out certain messages to the logs) before the next one can be started. The bash script has the following code which works really well for most cases:
tail -Fn +1 "$log_file" | while read line; do
if echo "$line" | grep -qEi "$search_text"; then
echo "[INFO] $process_name process started up successfully"
pkill -9 -P $$ tail
return 0
elif echo "$line" | grep -qEi '^error\b'; then
echo "[INFO] ERROR or Exception is thrown listed below. $process_name process startup aborted"
echo " ($line) "
echo "[INFO] Please check $process_name process log file=$log_file for problems"
pkill -9 -P $$ tail
return 1
fi
done
However, when we set the processes to print logging in DEBUG mode, they print so much logging that this script cannot keep up, and it takes about 15 minutes after the process is complete for the bash script to catch up. Is there a way of optimizing this, like changing 'while read line' to 'while read 100 lines', or something like that?
How about not forking up to two grep processes per log line?
tail -Fn +1 "$log_file" | grep -Ei "$search_text|^error\b" | while read line; do
So one long running grep process shall do preprocessing if you will.
Edit: As noted in the comments, it is safer to add --line-buffered to the grep invocation.
Some tips relevant for this script:
Checking that the service is doing its job is a much better check for daemon startup than looking at the log output
You can use grep ... <<<"$line" to execute fewer echos.
You can use tail -f | grep -q ... to avoid the while loop by stopping as soon as there's a matching line.
If you can avoid -i on grep it might be significantly faster to process the input.
Thou shalt not kill -9.

Shell script to get the process ID on Linux [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
How to get pid given the process name
(4 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
I want to write a shell script (.sh file) to get a given process id. What I'm trying to do here is once I get the process ID, I want to kill that process. I'm running on Ubuntu (Linux).
I was able to do it with a command like
ps -aux|grep ruby
kill -9 <pid>
but I'm not sure how to do it through a shell script.
Using grep on the results of ps is a bad idea in a script, since some proportion of the time it will also match the grep process you've just invoked. The command pgrep avoids this problem, so if you need to know the process ID, that's a better option. (Note that, of course, there may be many processes matched.)
However, in your example, you could just use the similar command pkill to kill all matching processes:
pkill ruby
Incidentally, you should be aware that using -9 is overkill (ho ho) in almost every case - there's some useful advice about that in the text of the "Useless Use of kill -9 form letter ":
No no no. Don't use kill -9.
It doesn't give the process a chance to cleanly:
shut down socket connections
clean up temp files
inform its children that it is going away
reset its terminal characteristics
and so on and so on and so on.
Generally, send 15, and wait a second or two, and if that doesn't
work, send 2, and if that doesn't work, send 1. If that doesn't,
REMOVE THE BINARY because the program is badly behaved!
Don't use kill -9. Don't bring out the combine harvester just to tidy
up the flower pot.
If you are going to use ps and grep then you should do it this way:
ps aux|grep r[u]by
Those square brackets will cause grep to skip the line for the grep command itself. So to use this in a script do:
output=`ps aux|grep r\[u\]by`
set -- $output
pid=$2
kill $pid
sleep 2
kill -9 $pid >/dev/null 2>&1
The backticks allow you to capture the output of a comand in a shell variable. The set -- parses the ps output into words, and $2 is the second word on the line which happens to be the pid. Then you send a TERM signal, wait a couple of seconds for ruby to to shut itself down, then kill it mercilessly if it still exists, but throw away any output because most of the time kill -9 will complain that the process is already dead.
I know that I have used this without the backslashes before the square brackets but just now I checked it on Ubuntu 12 and it seems to require them. This probably has something to do with bash's many options and the default config on different Linux distros. Hopefully the [ and ] will work anywhere but I no longer have access to the servers where I know that it worked without backslash so I cannot be sure.
One comment suggests grep-v and that is what I used to do, but then when I learned of the [] variant, I decided it was better to spawn one fewer process in the pipeline.
As a start there is no need to do a ps -aux | grep... The command pidof is far better to use. And almost never ever do kill -9 see here
to get the output from a command in bash, use something like
pid=$(pidof ruby)
or use pkill directly.
option -v is very important. It can exclude a grep expression itself
e.g.
ps -w | grep sshd | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' to get sshd id
This works in Cygwin but it should be effective in Linux as well.
ps -W | awk '/ruby/,NF=1' | xargs kill -f
or
ps -W | awk '$0~z,NF=1' z=ruby | xargs kill -f
Bash Pitfalls
You can use the command killall:
$ killall ruby
Its pretty simple.
Simply Run Any Program like this :- x= gedit & echo $! this will give you PID of this process.
then do this kill -9 $x
To kill the process in shell
getprocess=`ps -ef|grep servername`
#echo $getprocess
set $getprocess
pid=$2
#echo $pid
kill -9 $pid
If you already know the process then this will be useful:
PID=`ps -eaf | grep <process> | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
if [[ "" != "$PID" ]]; then
echo "killing $PID"
kill -9 $PID
fi

How can I kill a process by name instead of PID, on Linux? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Find and kill a process in one line using bash and regex
(30 answers)
Closed 1 year ago.
Sometimes when I try to start Firefox it says "a Firefox process is already running". So I have to do this:
jeremy#jeremy-desktop:~$ ps aux | grep firefox
jeremy 7451 25.0 27.4 170536 65680 ? Sl 22:39 1:18 /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.1/firefox
jeremy 7578 0.0 0.3 3004 768 pts/0 S+ 22:44 0:00 grep firefox
jeremy#jeremy-desktop:~$ kill 7451
What I'd like is a command that would do all that for me. It would take an input string and grep for it (or whatever) in the list of processes, and would kill all the processes in the output:
jeremy#jeremy-desktop:~$ killbyname firefox
I tried doing it in PHP but exec('ps aux') seems to only show processes that have been executed with exec() in the PHP script itself (so the only process it shows is itself.)
pkill firefox
More information: http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_pkill.htm
Also possible to use:
pkill -f "Process name"
For me, it worked up perfectly. It was what I have been looking for.
pkill doesn't work with name without the flag.
When -f is set, the full command line is used for pattern matching.
You can kill processes by name with killall <name>
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 executing that
particular file will be selected for
killing, independent of their name.
But if you don't see the process with ps aux, you probably won't have the right to kill it ...
A bit longer alternative:
kill `pidof firefox`
The easiest way to do is first check you are getting right process IDs with:
pgrep -f [part_of_a_command]
If the result is as expected. Go with:
pkill -f [part_of_a_command]
If processes get stuck and are unable to accomplish the request you can use kill.
kill -9 $(pgrep -f [part_of_a_command])
If you want to be on the safe side and only terminate processes that you initially started add -u along with your username
pkill -f [part_of_a_command] -u [username]
Kill all processes having snippet in startup path. You can kill all apps started from some directory by for putting /directory/ as a snippet. This is quite usefull when you start several components for the same application from the same app directory.
ps ax | grep <snippet> | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill
* I would prefer pgrep if available
Strange, but I haven't seen the solution like this:
kill -9 `pidof firefox`
it can also kill multiple processes (multiple pids) like:
kill -9 `pgrep firefox`
I prefer pidof since it has single line output:
> pgrep firefox
6316
6565
> pidof firefox
6565 6316
Using killall command:
killall processname
Use -9 or -KILL to forcefully kill the program (the options are similar to the kill command).
On Mac I could not find the pgrep and pkill neither was killall working so wrote a simple one liner script:-
export pid=`ps | grep process_name | awk 'NR==1{print $1}' | cut -d' ' -f1`;kill $pid
If there's an easier way of doing this then please share.
To kill with grep:
kill -9 `pgrep myprocess`
more correct would be:
export pid=`ps aux | grep process_name | awk 'NR==1{print $2}' | cut -d' ' -f1`;kill -9 $pid
I normally use the killall command.
Check this link for details of this command.
I was asking myself the same question but the problem with the current answers is that they don't safe check the processes to be killed so... it could lead to terrible mistakes :)... especially if several processes matches the pattern.
As a disclaimer, I'm not a sh pro and there is certainly room for improvement.
So I wrote a little sh script :
#!/bin/sh
killables=$(ps aux | grep $1 | grep -v mykill | grep -v grep)
if [ ! "${killables}" = "" ]
then
echo "You are going to kill some process:"
echo "${killables}"
else
echo "No process with the pattern $1 found."
return
fi
echo -n "Is it ok?(Y/N)"
read input
if [ "$input" = "Y" ]
then
for pid in $(echo "${killables}" | awk '{print $2}')
do
echo killing $pid "..."
kill $pid
echo $pid killed
done
fi
kill -9 $(ps aux | grep -e myprocessname| awk '{ print $2 }')
If you run GNOME, you can use the system monitor (System->Administration->System Monitor) to kill processes as you would under Windows. KDE will have something similar.
The default kill command accepts command names as an alternative to PID. See kill (1). An often occurring trouble is that bash provides its own kill which accepts job numbers, like kill %1, but not command names. This hinders the default command. If the former functionality is more useful to you than the latter, you can disable the bash version by calling
enable -n kill
For more info see kill and enable entries in bash (1).
ps aux | grep processname | cut -d' ' -f7 | xargs kill -9 $
awk oneliner, which parses the header of ps output, so you don't need to care about column numbers (but column names). Support regex. For example, to kill all processes, which executable name (without path) contains word "firefox" try
ps -fe | awk 'NR==1{for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) {if ($i=="COMMAND") Ncmd=i; else if ($i=="PID") Npid=i} if (!Ncmd || !Npid) {print "wrong or no header" > "/dev/stderr"; exit} }$Ncmd~"/"name"$"{print "killing "$Ncmd" with PID " $Npid; system("kill "$Npid)}' name=.*firefox.*

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