PKILL(1) BSD General Commands Manual PKILL(1)NAME
pgrep, pkill — find or signal processes by name
SYNOPSIS
pgrep [-flnvx] [-G gid] [-P ppid] [-U uid] [-d delim] [-g pgrp] [-s sid]
[-t tty] [-u euid] [pattern [...]]
pkill [-signal] [-fnvx] [-G gid] [-P ppid] [-U uid] [-g pgrp] [-s sid]
[-t tty] [-u euid] [pattern [...]]
DESCRIPTION
The pgrep command searches the process table on the running system and
prints the process IDs of all processes that match the criteria given on
the command line.
The pkill command searches the process table on the running system and
signals all processes that match the criteria given on the command line.
The following options are available:
-G gid Restrict matches to processes with a real group ID in the
comma-separated list gid.
-P ppid Restrict matches to processes with a parent process ID in the
comma-separated list ppid.
-U uid Restrict matches to processes with a real user ID in the comma-
separated list uid.
-d delim Specify a delimiter to be printed between each process ID. The
default is a newline. This option can only be used with the
pgrep command.
-f Match against full argument lists. The default is to match
against process names.
-g pgrp Restrict matches to processes with a process group ID in the
comma-separated list pgrp. The value zero is taken to mean the
process group ID of the running pgrep or pkill command.
-l Long output. Print the process name in addition to the process
ID for each matching process. If used in conjunction with -f,
print the process ID and the full argument list for each match‐
ing process. This option can only be used with the pgrep com‐
mand.
-n Match only the most recently created process, if any.
-s sid Restrict matches to processes with a session ID in the comma-
separated list sid. The value zero is taken to mean the ses‐
sion ID of the running pgrep or pkill command.
-t tty Restrict matches to processes associated with a terminal in the
comma-separated list tty. Terminal names may be of the form
‘ttyxx’ or the shortened form ‘xx’. A single dash (`-')
matches processes not associated with a terminal.
-u euid Restrict matches to processes with an effective user ID in the
comma-separated list euid.
-v Reverse the sense of the matching; display processes that do
not match the given criteria.
-x Require an exact match of the process name, or argument list if
-f is given. The default is to match any substring.
-signal A non-negative decimal number or symbolic signal name specify‐
ing the signal to be sent instead of the default TERM. This
option is valid only when given as the first argument to pkill.
Note that a running pgrep or pkill process will never consider itself nor
system processes (kernel threads) as a potential match.
DIAGNOSTICS
pgrep and pkill return one of the following values upon exit:
0 One or more processes were matched.
1 No processes were matched.
2 Invalid options were specified on the command line.
3 An internal error occurred.
SEE ALSOkill(1), ps(1), kill(2), sigaction(2), signal(3), re_format(7)HISTORYpkill and pgrep originated in NetBSD 1.6. They are modeled after utili‐
ties of the same name that appeared in Sun Solaris 7. They first
appeared in DragonFly in version 1.1.
AUTHORS
Andrew Doran ⟨ad@NetBSD.org⟩.
BSD July 27, 2004 BSD
