How do you kill all Linux processes that are older than a certain age?
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?
Solution 1:
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 $2}' | xargs -I{} kill {}
(Where user-id is a specific user's ID with long-running processes.)
The second regular expression matches the a time that has an optional days figure, followed by an hour, minute, and second component, and so is at least one hour in length.
Solution 2:
If they just need to be killed:
if [[ "$(uname)" = "Linux" ]];then killall --older-than 1h someprocessname;fi
If you want to see what it's matching
if [[ "$(uname)" = "Linux" ]];then killall -i --older-than 1h someprocessname;fi
The -i flag will prompt you with yes/no for each process match.
Solution 3:
For anything older than one day,
ps aux
will give you the answer, but it drops down to day-precision which might not be as useful.
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 1 0.0 0.0 7200 308 ? Ss Jun22 0:02 init [5]
root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jun22 0:02 [migration/0]
root 3 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SN Jun22 0:18 [ksoftirqd/0]
root 4 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S Jun22 0:00 [watchdog/0]
If you're on linux or another system with the /proc filesystem, In this example, you can only see that process 1 has been running since June 22, but no indication of the time it was started.
stat /proc/<pid>
will give you a more precise answer. For example, here's an exact timestamp for process 1, which ps shows only as Jun22:
ohm ~$ stat /proc/1
File: `/proc/1'
Size: 0 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 directory
Device: 3h/3d Inode: 65538 Links: 5
Access: (0555/dr-xr-xr-x) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2008-06-22 15:37:44.347627750 -0700
Modify: 2008-06-22 15:37:44.347627750 -0700
Change: 2008-06-22 15:37:44.347627750 -0700
Solution 4:
In this way you can obtain the list of the ten oldest processes:
ps -elf | sort -r -k12 | head -n 10
Solution 5:
Jodie C and others have pointed out that killall -i can be used, which is fine if you want to use the process name to kill. But if you want to kill by the same parameters as pgrep -f, you need to use something like the following, using pure bash and the /proc filesystem.
#!/bin/sh
max_age=120 # (seconds)
naughty="$(pgrep -f offlineimap)"
if [[ -n "$naughty" ]]; then # naughty is running
age_in_seconds=$(echo "$(date +%s) - $(stat -c %X /proc/$naughty)" | bc)
if [[ "$age_in_seconds" -ge "$max_age" ]]; then # naughty is too old!
kill -s 9 "$naughty"
fi
fi
This lets you find and kill processes older than max_age seconds using the full process name; i.e., the process named /usr/bin/python2 offlineimap can be killed by reference to "offlineimap", whereas the killall solutions presented here will only work on the string "python2".