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I have multiple screens running on an Ubuntu server that are initiated as:

screen -dmS screen1 cmd
screen -dmS screen2 cmd
etc...

And I need to kill one screen, but not all of them. What is the correct command to kill a single particular screen with its name? I've read through the man pages but I can't seem to find the command I am looking for.

Also I want to write this command into a bash script so I can't simply screen -r screen1 then press Ctrl+X as I normally would.

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Sorry, thought this was about Donkey Kong for a second – Chopper3 Dec 21 '09 at 18:46
I love this t-shirt ohgizmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/… – Chopper3 Dec 21 '09 at 18:57
That is a nice tee, most people won't get it thou, unless they've seen "The King of Kong": imdb.com/title/tt0923752 – BassKozz Dec 21 '09 at 19:07
The correct word for an object of a phrase is "thee". – Dennis Williamson Dec 21 '09 at 19:12
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You said "get it thou" here and "Thanks thou" below. It should be "get it [for] thee" and "Thanks [be to] thee". – Dennis Williamson Dec 21 '09 at 23:08
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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

From the man page :

   -X   Send the specified command to a running screen  session.  You  can
        use  the  -d or -r option to tell screen to look only for attached
        or detached screen sessions. Note that this command  doesn't  work
        if the session is password protected.

You can do : 

        screen -X -S <sessionid> kill
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PERFECT!!! Thanks defraagh, musta missed that in the man. – BassKozz Dec 21 '09 at 19:05
Good to know :-) – Raphink Dec 21 '09 at 20:05
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If you do a screen -list, you'll notice that each screen name begins with a number, which is the PID of the screen:

 $ screen -list
There are screens on:
        12281.pts-1.jonah       (12/21/2009 07:53:19 PM)        (Attached)
        10455.pts-1.jonah       (12/19/2009 10:55:25 AM)        (Detached)
2 Sockets in /var/run/screen/S-raphink.

From there, just send a KILL signal to this specific PID:

$ kill 12281

and it will kill the specific screen.

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this won't work because I am running it from a bash script, and I rather not have to pull the PID from screen -list that matches the correct screen... defraagh's answer above worked like a charm. Thanks thou. – BassKozz Dec 21 '09 at 19:03
Ok, good that defraagh had a perfect solution for it. – Raphink Dec 21 '09 at 20:05
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up vote 0 down vote

defraagh's solution doesn't work for me, however I can kill the screen session using Raphink's idea:

screen -list get the process ID

kill -9 PROCESSID

screen -wipe SESSIONID

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