How do you kill all Linux processes that are older than a certain age?

linux bash unix process
yukondude picture yukondude · Aug 8, 2008 · Viewed 85.3k times · Source

I have a problem with some zombie-like processes on a certain server that need to be killed every now and then. How can I best identify the ones that have run for longer than an hour or so?

Answer

yukondude picture yukondude · Aug 8, 2008

Found an answer that works for me:

warning: this will find and kill long running processes

ps -eo uid,pid,etime | egrep '^ *user-id' | egrep ' ([0-9]+-)?([0-9]{2}:?){3}' | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -I{} kill {}

(Where user-id is a specific user's ID with long-running processes.)

The second regular expression matches the a time that has an optional days figure, followed by an hour, minute, and second component, and so is at least one hour in length.

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