Hello, this works, but it kills every Python process.
pkill python
However, I cannot do:
pkill myscript.py
I have also tried killall, but with no luck either. Do I have to user regular expressions?
By the way, I want to do this in a python script with import os.
you need to lookup the process id (pid). You can use the command "ps -A | grep NAME" and then apply "kill -9 PID". These commands can easily be translated to python.
Trying to use a "name" (as in pkill) can yield multiple matches and thus unexpected results (at least in the context set above in the question).
Are you able to have the process write it's pid to a file?
In Python you get the pid like this:
import os
os.getpid()
Killing by name is convenient, but sometimes has undesired consequences as you have seen.
Did you launch the Python subprocess from the same script you are killing it from? If so, see this question for details. If not, you can use pkill's -f option to search for the script name in the Python process's argument list, but you still run the risk of killing something you didn't intend to. See the man page for more info.
Try this:
echo '#!/usr/bin/env python' > myscript
cat myscript.py >>myscript
chmod +x myscript
./myscript
Of course you will have to change the code to kill a process named "myscript"
On UNIX systems, an executable file contains a few bytes at the beginning which tell the OS what binary format is being used. If the first two bytes are #! then the OS assumes that this is actually a text file which can be executed by another program, and the OS loads the other program and passes to it, the text file.
In this case I probably could have written #!/usr/bin/python on the top line, but if your python is in /usr/local/bin, then it would not work. Instead, I leverage env to get it to search your normal path for python. All UNIX systems have env in /usr/bin. For a bit more info you can type in man env.
Thanks, that pkill helped in killing a python task specifically instead of killing all my python tasks as i had my script setup before.