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I want an easy way in linux to kill all my current processes.

The problem with kill -9 -1 is that it also kills the current terminal. Is there an easy way to kill everything except the current terminal?

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Should be on serverfault.com =). – Clement H. Jul 16 '09 at 8:48
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why should be in server fault? isn't bash programming too? – flybywire Jul 16 '09 at 8:49
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It actually should be on both, but it's not quite possible? – Nathan Fellman Jul 16 '09 at 8:50
this is not about configuring, troubleshooting or administering servers. it belongs here – flybywire Jul 16 '09 at 8:52
It's about bash cli, it belongs either here (server fault) or on superuser. – Cian Jul 16 '09 at 11:36
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jul 16 '09 at 9:52

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2 Answers

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This kills all processes except the ones associated with the current terminal:

kill `ps -o pid= -N T`
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doesn't work under debian. ps lists all processes – ThorstenS Jul 16 '09 at 11:04
The "T" argument to "ps" selects all processes associated with the current terminal and "-N" will negate that. – Inshalla Jul 16 '09 at 16:32
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up vote 2 down vote

But just want to say don't use -9 as a knee jerk mechanism as it should be used as a last resort. It can't be caught by the process and doesn't let a process cleanup its resources.

Try maybe kill -15 instead to start.

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-0.5 belongs to stackoverflow. -0.5 the one who wrote the processes knows best what is good to kill them – flybywire Jul 16 '09 at 8:54
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