killall(1) BSD General Commands Manual killall(1)
NAME
killall -- kill processes by name
SYNOPSIS
killall [-delmsvz] [-help] [-u user] [-t tty] [-c procname] [-SIGNAL]
[procname ...]
DESCRIPTION
The killall utility kills processes selected by name, as opposed to the
selection by pid as done by kill(1). By default, it will send a TERM
signal to all processes with a real UID identical to the caller of
killall that match the name procname. The super-user is allowed to kill
any process.
The options are as follows:
-d | -v Be more verbose about what will be done. For a single
-d option, a list of the processes that will be sent
the signal will be printed, or a message indicating
that no matching processes have been found.
-e Use the effective user ID instead of the (default) real
user ID for matching processes specified with the -u
option.
-help Give a help on the command usage and exit.
-l List the names of the available signals and exit, like
in kill(1).
-m Match the argument procname as a (case sensitive) regu-
lar expression against the names of processes found.
CAUTION! This is dangerous, a single dot will match
any process running under the real UID of the caller.
-s Show only what would be done, but do not send any sig-
nal.
-SIGNAL Send a different signal instead of the default TERM.
The signal may be specified either as a name (with or
without a leading SIG), or numerically.
-u user Limit potentially matching processes to those belonging
to the specified user.
-t tty Limit potentially matching processes to those running
on the specified tty.
-c procname
When used with the -u or -t flags, limit potentially
matching processes to those matching the specified
procname.
-z Do not skip zombies. This should not have any effect
except to print a few error messages if there are zom-
bie processes that match the specified pattern.
ALL PROCESSES
Sending a signal to all processes with uid XYZ is already supported by
kill(1). So use kill(1) for this job (e.g. $ kill -TERM -1 or as root $
echo kill -TERM -1 | su -m <user>)
EXIT STATUS
The killall command will respond with a short usage message and exit with
a status of 2 in case of a command error. A status of 1 will be returned
if either no matching process has been found or not all processes have
been signalled successfully. Otherwise, a status of 0 will be returned.
DIAGNOSTICS
Diagnostic messages will only be printed if requested by -d options.
SEE ALSO
kill(1), sysctl(3)
HISTORY
The killall command appeared in FreeBSD 2.1. It has been modeled after
the killall command as available on other platforms.
AUTHORS
The killall program was originally written in Perl and was contributed by
Wolfram Schneider, this manual page has been written by Jorg Wunsch. The
current version of killall was rewritten in C by Peter Wemm using
sysctl(3).
BSD January 26, 2004 BSD
Mac OS X 10.6 - Generated Thu Sep 17 20:07:57 CDT 2009