My Mac becomes slow over time. The reason is the huge amount of my shells, such as Bashes and Fishes. Each shell has different PID. Killing shells one by one is too cumbersome. How can I kill them at once?
+12
A:
The killall command can kill all processes with a given name:
killall bash
Robert Gamble
2009-01-18 17:15:14
Doesn't this endanger the shell from which it is run?
Jonathan Leffler
2009-01-18 19:31:31
Also, this is linux specific. Older unixies had differnet symantics for "killall".
dmckee
2009-01-18 20:28:24
Um. Actuall it works in Mac OS X as well.
dmckee
2009-01-18 20:29:10
@Jonathan: Yes, if the shell the example is run from is a bash shell then it will be killed as well, from the question this appears to be the desired behavior.
Robert Gamble
2009-01-18 21:36:11
"appears to be the desired behavior": at least it is the one he asked for...which is not always what is actually desired...
dmckee
2009-01-18 23:22:53
@Robert: I guess "be careful what you ask for; you might get it" is roughly what applies. The caveat has now been given to the questioner by these comments. :D
Jonathan Leffler
2009-01-20 07:29:22
+1
A:
Know the filename of the executable? You can use "killall " on many Unix systems.
# killall <name>
rjamestaylor
2009-01-18 17:16:38
+7
A:
As per other answers, the usual command is killall.
Note though that on some versions of UNIX (e.g. DEC Unix) this command literally kills all processes.
Do make sure that you know which behaviour your UNIX has before using it!
Alnitak
2009-01-18 17:28:00
@Keltia, signals and kill(1) are completely irrelevant to this question/answer.
Dave C
2009-01-18 23:24:07
A:
I think that you cannot kill all your Shells at once. You have to use many killalls, separately to each Shell like Rjamestaylor says above:
killall bash
killall fish
And so on.
Masi
2009-01-18 23:29:07
Well, if you're executing this from a bash shell (the default on OS X), you'll want to run those two commands in the opposite order. :-)
Ben Blank
2009-01-19 08:46:17
+4
A:
I strongly doubt your initial diagnosis. In Unix, an inactive process does not take resources. It is not scheduled, its memory is swapped out, etc. If there is a problem of slowness, it probably has another cause. Running top is the first step.
bortzmeyer
2009-01-19 08:03:36
The Fish shell, probably a beta, consumes almost all of my CPU. It is shame as Fish is easy to use. I like the colours.
Masi
2009-01-19 17:27:56