KILLALL(1) BSD General Commands Manual KILLALL(1)NAMEkillall — kill processes by name
SYNOPSISkillall [-delmsvz] [-help] [-j jail] [-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) regular
expression against the names of processes found. CAUTION!
This is dangerous, a single dot will match any process run‐
ning under the real UID of the caller.
-s Show only what would be done, but do not send any signal.
-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.
-j jail Kill processes in the specified jail.
-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 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 zombie processes
that match the specified pattern.
ALL PROCESSES
Sending a signal to all processes with the given UID 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 utility exits 0 if some processes have been found and sig‐
nalled successfully. Otherwise, a status of 1 will be returned.
DIAGNOSTICS
Diagnostic messages will only be printed if requested by -d options.
SEE ALSOkill(1), pkill(1), sysctl(3), jail(8)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 Jörg Wunsch. The
current version of killall was rewritten in C by Peter Wemm using
sysctl(3).
BSD May 27, 2009 BSD