Finding and Killing Linux pids

Someone left a program running for days, and its killing the server and they're  out for a long weekend.  what can you do?

To find all the processes running by a user

ps -fu jbrooks

to see all processes running in full view as opposed to list view

ps -ef

Nice list of how to use ps

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ps-command-in-linux-with-examples/

Once you have found the process[es]

you can stop them from running with the kill command

kill -s 9 11677

These show more, in increasing depth.

• https://www.howtoforge.com/linux-kill-command/
• https://www.unix.com/man-page/Linux/1/kill/
• https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/signal.7.html

I'm going to throw in xargs here too.

This is great for killing a list of pids.  It takes the output of a command and does a "crosstab" kind of transform to allow a new command to iterate over the list as inputs

ps --ppid 11438|cut -d' ' -f 2 |xargs kill

finally, pkill takes the parent pid and kills the children leaving no zombies.  The parent pid is the second pid number, the PPID

UID         PID   PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
jbrooks+  23746      1  0 Jan30 ?        00:00:02 /usr/bin/bash ./date_db2mon.sh
jbrooks+ 101236      1  0  2022 ?        00:00:44 /usr/bin/bash ./date_exp_edw.sh 2
jbrooks+ 137688 137671  0 11:25 ?        00:00:00 sshd: jbrooks@pts/5
jbrooks+ 137689 137688  0 11:25 pts/5    00:00:00 -bash
jbrooks+ 162053 161508  0 13:49 ?        00:00:00 sshd: jbrooks@pts/2

pkill -P 137671