Kill all processes for a given user

posix
Shea Levy picture Shea Levy · Mar 16, 2013 · Viewed 177.1k times · Source

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 killing process first. The best I can find so far is to loop through system("ps -u") for that user and kill the processes that way, but that seems really hacky and inefficient.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm specifically asking for a POSIX-compatable solution. For some reason I thought tagging the question posix would put that in the title.

Answer

uselpa picture uselpa · Mar 16, 2013

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

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