killall(1) BSD General Commands Manual killall(1)
NAME
killall - kill processes by name
SYNOPSIS
killall [-d | -v] [-h | -?] [-help] [-l] [-m] [-s] [-u user] [-t tty]
[-c procname] [-SIGNAL] [procname ...]
DESCRIPTION
Killall 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.
-h | -?
-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 insensitive)
regular 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
progname.
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>)
DIAGNOSTICS
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.
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 June 25, 1995 BSD
Mac OS X 10.3 - Generated Sat Feb 2 05:33:53 CST 2008