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KILLALL(1)                               BSD General Commands Manual                              KILLALL(1)

NAME
     killall -- kill processes by name

SYNOPSIS
     killall [-delmsvz] [-help] [-u user] [-t tty] [-c procname] [-SIGNAL] [procname ...]

DESCRIPTION
     The killall utility 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 pro-cesses processes
                       cesses that will be sent the signal will be printed, or a message indicating that no
                       matching processes have been found.

           -e          Use the effective user ID instead of the (default) real user ID for matching pro-cesses processes
                       cesses specified with the -u option.

           -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 sensitive) 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 procname.

           -z          Do not skip zombies.  This should not have any effect except to print a few error
                       messages if there are zombie processes that match the specified pattern.

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>)

EXIT STATUS
     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.

DIAGNOSTICS
     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 avail-able available
     able on other platforms.

AUTHORS
     The killall program was originally written in Perl and was contributed by Wolfram Schneider, this man-ual manual
     ual page has been written by J"rg Wunsch.  The current version of killall was rewritten in C by Peter
     Wemm using sysctl(3).

BSD                                           January 26, 2004                                           BSD