killall

killall is a command line utility available on Unix-like systems. There are two very different implementations.

• The implementation supplied with genuine UNIX System V (including Solaris) and with the Linux sysvinit tools (as killall5) is a particularly dangerous command that kills all processes that the user is able to kill, effectively shutting down the system if run by root.
• The implementation supplied with the FreeBSD (including Mac OS X) and Linux psmisc tools is similar to the pkill and skill commands, killing only the processes specified on the command line.

Both commands operate by sending a signal, like the kill program.

Example usage

Kill all processes (UNIX System V version)

 killall

Kill the GNOME Display Manager

 killall gdm

Kill the Dock (restarts) (Mac OS X)

 killall Dock

List all signals (FreeBSD/Linux version)

 killall -l

Send the USR1 signal to the dd process (FreeBSD/Linux version)

 killall -s USR1 dd

Kill a process which is not responding (FreeBSD/Linux version)

 killall -9 dd

The numeric argument specifies a signal to send to the process. In this case, the command sends signal 9 to the process, which is SIGKILL, as opposed to the default SIGTERM.

See also

• List of Unix programs
• Signals
• pidof

External links

• killall: kill processes by name – Shell and Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX Specification, Version 4 from The Open Group
• killall(1) – FreeBSD General Commands Manual
• killall(1) – Darwin and macOS General Commands Manual