What is pkill

The result is that data might be lost. When using the pkill command to terminate a process, first try using the command by itself, without including a signal option. Wait a few minutes to see if the process terminates before using the pkill command with the -9 signal. If they are misused they can bring a server down.

If you are new to these two commands it is recommended that you learn on a non production server. During this tutorial we will use the ps , more and the grep command. We will not cover the detailed usage of these commands but their usage should be self explanatory. Please see the relevant man pages for details. A process is a running program in memory or part of a program.

In its simplest form it is a complete program, however some programs such as Apache will spawn additional processes so that it can run many jobs in parallel across the multiple cores of the CPU.

PID 1 is the first process on a Linux server to be run and up until recently was always called init. This was the system initialization process and loaded all further programs. To view a list of running processes you can use the command ps aux. The ps command lists running processes. You can safely play around with the three options a , u and x in different combinations.

However ps aux gives you most details that you will require when managing a Linux system. If you try this command and the list is too long for your screen you can pipe it to more like this ps aux more. If you want to filter the list use ps aux grep [process name].

For example,. On the other hand,. Find the process ID of the named name daemon process. Send the HUP signal to syslogd , which forces it to re-read its configuration file. Make all firefox processes run nicer by a value of 4. This command illustrates the way pgrep 's output can be passed to other utilities as input.

Home Help Linux. Description Syntax Examples Related commands Linux commands help. I am running motion with several ipcameras running to collect their respective motion detections and snaphots images. I needed to get the pkill pattern matching right so that it only saw and stopped the motion app and not the script which had the name "motion" in it.

I am facing the issue with pkill execution inside the bash script. It seems that pkill kills the whole process and next commands are not executed. Do you know what is going on there? Have a nice day. This feature is only available to subscribers. Get your subscription here. Log in or Sign up. On this page Linux pkill command Q1. How to use pkill command?