killall Command in Linux with Examples

Have you ever confronted the circumstance where you executed a program or an application, and abruptly while you are utilizing the application, it gets halted and starts to crash? You attempt to begin the application again, yet nothing happens on the grounds that the first application measure never genuinely closes down totally. The arrangement is to end the application cycle. Fortunately, there are a few utilities in Linux that permits you to execute the kill process.

It is recommended to read kill Command before proceeding further.

The primary contrast between the kill and killall command is that the “kill” ends process cycles dependent on Process ID number (PID), while the killall orders end running cycles dependent on their names and different attributes. Normal users can end/kill their own cycles(processes), however not those that have a place with different users, while the root client can end all cycles.

The ionice device acknowledges the accompanying alternatives:

Tag	Description
-e,–exact	require an exact match for very long names
-I,–ignore-case	case insensitive process name match
-g,–process-group	kill process group instead of process
-y,–younger-than	kill processes younger than TIME
-o,–older-than	kill processes older than TIME
-i,–interactive	ask for confirmation before killing
-l,–list	list all known signal names
-q,–quiet	don’t print complaints
-r,–regexp	interpret NAME as an extended regular expression
-s,–signal SIGNAL	send this signal instead of SIGTERM
-u,–user USER	kill the only process(es) running as USER
-v,–verbose	report if the signal was successfully sent
-V,–version	display version information
-w,–wait	wait for processes to die
-n,–ns PID	match processes that belong to the same namespaces as PID or 0 for all namespaces

To know the contrast among kill and killall orders we first need to ensure that we comprehend the nuts and bolts behind cycles on the Linux OS. The process is an occurrence of a running system. Each process cycle is allotted PID ( Process ID ) which is remarkable for each cycle and in this way, no two cycles can be allocated the same PID. When the cycle is ended the PID is accessible for reuse. 

Working with killall command

General Syntax:

killall [ -Z CONTEXT ] [ -u USER ] [ -y TIME ] [ -o TIME ] [ -eIgiqrvw ] [ -s SIGNAL | -SIGNAL ] NAME...

1. The command below will begin the process yes and yield its standard output to/dev/null. What we are keen on here, is the second line which contains the accompanying data “[1]” ( work ID ) and “16017” the real PID. On your Linux OS, you can run numerous cycles at some random time and each cycle, contingent upon the client benefits can be ended utilizing either kill or killall orders.

$ yes > /dev/null &

2. From the above you can see that we have begun extra cycles utilizing yes order and that each cycle has diverse PID. To list all your measures forked from the current shell use “jobs” command:

$ jobs

3. The contrast between kill versus killall commands is that with kill order we can end just a solitary cycle at that point, though with killall order we can end numerous cycles dependent on given models, for example, process group, process age, or client privilege. Now, we will use “kill” command to terminate the process with PID “16022”:

$ sudo kill 16022

Now, from the above command, we have terminated the process with PID 16022, and it was processed no. [4]. We can also verify the command execution by giving the “jobs” command:

4. Ending each cycle individually can end up being hard and repetitive work. We should see whether we can get some assistance by utilizing killall order and process cycle name:

$ sudo killall yes

Now, we can easily observe that all processes running under the name “yes” have been terminated successfully.