ARCHIVED: In Unix, how can I quickly kill all the jobs I created under my current shell?

This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.

In Unix, to quickly kill all the jobs running under the Korn shell (ksh) or Bourne-again shell (bash), enter:

  kill `jobs -p`

In bash, you may also use the following variant:

  jobs -x kill

Under the C shell (csh) and the TC shell (tcsh), there is no simple way to do this without writing an elaborate script on the command line (starting another program/script to do this would be a job itself).

Note: You can add a -KILL after the kill commands above to do a more forceful kill. Use this only if a simple kill does not work (as -KILL forces a quick, possibly ungraceful, exit of the process).

At Indiana University, for personal or departmental Linux or Unix systems support, see Get help for Linux or Unix at IU.

This is document aegh in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2018-01-18 09:32:14.