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:

           -v          Be more verbose about what will be done.

           -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.

           -l          List the names of the available signals and exit, like
                       in kill(1).

           -m          Match the argument procname as a (case sensitive) regu-
                       lar 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 sig-
                       nal.

           -d          Print detailed information about the processes matched,
                       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 zom-
                       bie 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 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 J"org Wunsch.  The
     current version of killall was rewritten in C by Peter Wemm using
     sysctl(3).

BSD                            January 26, 2004                            BSD