KILLALL(1)              FreeBSD General Commands Manual             KILLALL(1)

NAME

     killall - kill processes by name

SYNOPSIS

     killall [-delmsvz] [-help] [-I] [-j jail] [-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             Be more verbose about what will be done, but do not send
                    any signal.  The total number of user processes and the
                    real user ID is shown.  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.

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

     -help          Give a help on the command usage and exit.

     -I             Request confirmation before attempting to signal each
                    process.

     -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.

     -v             Be verbose about what will be done.

     -s             Same as -v, 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.

     -j jail        Kill processes in the specified jail.

     -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    Limit potentially matching processes to those matching the
                    specified procname.

     -q             Suppress error message if no processes are matched.

     -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 the given UID 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>").

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES

     This FreeBSD implementation of killall has completely different semantics
     as compared to the traditional Unix System V behavior of killall.  The
     latter will kill all processes that the current user is able to kill, and
     is intended to be used by the system shutdown process only.

EXIT STATUS

     The killall utility exits 0 if some processes have been found and
     signalled successfully.  Otherwise, a status of 1 will be returned.

EXAMPLES

     Send SIGTERM to all firefox processes:

           killall firefox

     Send SIGTERM to firefox processes belonging to USER:

           killall -u ${USER} firefox

     Stop all firefox processes:

           killall -SIGSTOP firefox

     Resume firefox processes:

           killall -SIGCONT firefox

     Show what would be done to firefox processes, but do not actually signal
     them:

           killall -s firefox

     Send SIGKILL to csh process running inside jail ID 282:

           killall -9 -j282 csh

     Send SIGTERM to all processes matching provided pattern (like vim and
     vimdiff):

           killall -m 'vim*'

DIAGNOSTICS

     Diagnostic messages will only be printed if the -d flag is used.

SEE ALSO

     kill(1), pkill(1), sysctl(3), jail(8)

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 Jorg Wunsch.  The
     current version of killall was rewritten in C by Peter Wemm using
     sysctl(3).

FreeBSD 15.1-STABLE-HBSD         June 27, 2020                      KILLALL(1)