How to Kill a Process Based on Part of the Process Name
Category : How-to
This is a small, handy snippet to kill a Linux process based on matching a string from the ps command output.
For example, we may want to kill the mongodb process based on matching just the string mongo.
We would use the below command, consisting of ps and grep to get the process we would like to kill.
ps aux | grep mongo mongodb 1025 0.7 7.9 5076284 39120 ? Sl Jul08 10:16 /usr/bin/mongod --config /etc/mongodb.conf root 11873 0.0 0.1 11748 916 pts/0 S+ 19:07 0:00 grep --color=auto mongo
We need to change the grep slightly, to stop the actual grep command process that we just ran from returning. We can add [] around part of the matching string to stop the process from being matched exactly as it will be parsed as a pattern, and not a literal string.
ps aux | grep mong[o] mongodb 1025 0.7 7.9 5076284 39120 ? Sl Jul08 10:16 /usr/bin/mongod --config /etc/mongodb.conf
It doesn’t matter where on the string you add the brackets, as long as they are there somewhere.
Using awk we can now filter the results line to only print out the pid of the mongodb process.
ps aux | grep mong[o] | awk {'print$2'}
1025
Finally, we need to wrap all of this with the kill statement to remove the process. Be careful here as this will immediately kill the process with no warning or confirmation. This is just an example, it’s never a good idea to forcefully kill the mongodb process!
kill -9 `ps aux | grep mong[o] | awk {'print$2'}`
And that’s it, the mongodb process is dead!
The thing I find most annoying with Windows is that it isn’t Linux. Let’s forget the argument of free software, the interchangeable GUIs, the security and everything else which constitutes the usual Linux vs. Windows argument and focus on things I use everyday in Linux which are missing in Windows. Two major things come to mind; tail for monitoring logs and grep which is the easiest way to find something in a file.