Kill All Process in One Step in Linux

Killing processes is something necessary in order to restart it when you cannot stop the service gracefully. Killing one process is easy but when you have more than one processes you need to kill, doing it one by one can be long.

Let's say you have multiple processes' apache running (for Intranet, Extranet, Development Environment, etc...) and you need to kill all of them at the same time.

First of all let's grab apache processes:

ps au | grep apache

This will display something like:

eric@ubuntu:~$ ps auxf | grep apache
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root      1545  0.0  0.2  33576  8736 ?        Ss   08:02   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
root      1547  0.2  0.3  33592  8871 ?        Ss   08:03   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
root      1548  0.1  0.2  33613  8921 ?        Ss   08:03   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
root      1550  0.0  0.3  33649  9071 ?        Ss   08:03   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
root      1553  0.3  0.2  33786  9231 ?        Ss   08:03   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

Now we need their PID

ps au | grep apache | awk '{print $2}'

That will output only the PID list:

Then kill them:

kill -9 `ps au | grep apache | awk '{print $2}'`