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Mac OS X / Darwin man pages : killall (1)
killall (1)

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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 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.

-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 J"org Wunsch. The current version of killall was rewritten in C by Peter Wemm using sysctl(3) .

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