Kill all processes for a given user

Question

Is there a reliable way to kill all the processes of a given user? kill(-1, SIGKILL) as that user will work, unless a rogue process of that user kills the killi

Answer 1

Just (temporarily) killed my Macbook with

killall -u pu -m .

where pu is my userid. Watch the dot at the end of the command.

Also try

pkill -u pu

or

ps -o pid -u pu | xargs kill -1

Answer 2

Here is a one liner that does this, just replace username with the username you want to kill things for. Don't even think on putting root there!

pkill -9 -u `id -u username`

Note: if you want to be nice remove -9, but it will not kill all kinds of processes.

Answer 3

What about iterating on the /proc virtual file system ? http://linux.die.net/man/5/proc ?

Answer 4

The following kills all the processes created by this user:

kill  -9  -1

Answer 5

On Debian LINUX, I use: ps -o pid= -u username | xargs sudo kill -9.

With -o pid= the ps header is supressed, and the output is only the pid list. As far as I know, Debian shell is POSIX compliant.