pkill — Terminate processes by name

💬 "pkill command"

pkill finds processes by name pattern and sends a signal. It reduces the hassle of combining ps+kill.

To avoid accidentally killing other processes, it is important to use -f and get into the habit of checking targets first.

• Concept: Sends a signal to targets based on process name/command-line patterns.
• Default signal: If not specified, requests graceful termination with SIGTERM(15).
• -f: Searches the entire command line.
• -0: Only checks targets without actually killing them.

Commonly used options

3 essential command combinations

• pgrep -af 'batch.sh' — Check targets first (safest)
• pkill -u myapp -f 'queue:work' — Terminate by specifying both user and pattern
• pkill -TERM -f 'php-fpm' && sleep 2 && pgrep -af php-fpm — Check for leftover processes after graceful termination

💬 "Show me how to use this as a monitoring metric"

Here are common situations on live production servers, organized step by step.

Step 1 · Check targets

First, use pgrep to see what will be killed.

pgrep -af 'queue:work'

Step 2 · Request graceful termination

Request termination with SIGTERM.

pkill -TERM -f 'queue:work'

Step 3 · Check for leftover processes

If any remain, investigate the cause and consider forced termination.

pgrep -af 'queue:work' || echo CLEAN

How it is used in practice

1. Clean up stuck workers

Situation — Queue workers are piling up unresponsive, so you need to launch new workers.

pkill -TERM -f 'queue:work' && sleep 2 && pgrep -af 'queue:work'

Result — Confirm that the workers terminated gracefully and no processes remain.

Point — Send TERM first so in-flight work finishes safely.

2. Only processes for a specific user

Situation — On a shared server used by multiple users, clean up only your own tasks.

pkill -u deploy -f 'deploy.sh'

Result — Only deploy user processes are terminated, so other users are unaffected.

Point — Without -u, processes with the same name belonging to other users will also be killed.

Things to watch out for

• If you provide a short name pattern without -f, the wrong processes may match.
• -9 skips cleanup work and carries a risk of data loss.
• If you mistakenly terminate critical system processes (such as sshd), your connection will drop.
• Always check targets with pgrep -af before executing.

Actual execution screen

This is the result of checking targets, sending a graceful termination signal, and verifying that no leftover processes remain.

!pkill command execution result: checking targets and graceful termination

Live production server

Source (HTML): https://games.aidebatehub.com/programs/linux/services/pkill.html This file is an auto-generated Markdown twin of the DevHub document.