How do I kill all a user’s processes using their UID

I want to kill all running processes of a particular user from either a shell script or native code on a Linux system.

Do I have to read the /proc directory and look for these?

Any ideas? Is there a dynamic mapping of the pids under UIDs in Linux? Isn’t this in the proc?

If not, then where is this list maintained? Should I read from it? Also where is the static list of all UIDs in the system so I can validate this this user exists and then proceed to kill all processes running under it?

Answers:

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Method 1

Use pkill -U UID or pkill -u UID or username instead of UID. Sometimes skill -u USERNAME may work, another tool is killall -u USERNAME.

Skill was a linux-specific and is now outdated, and pkill is more portable (Linux, Solaris, BSD).

pkill allow both numberic and symbolic UIDs, effective and real http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/pkill.1.html

pkill – … signal processes based on name and other attributes

    -u, --euid euid,...
         Only match processes whose effective user ID is listed.
         Either the numerical or symbolical value may be used.
    -U, --uid uid,...
         Only match processes whose real user ID is listed.  Either the
         numerical or symbolical value may be used.

Man page of skill says is it allowed only to use username, not user id: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/skill.1.html

skill, snice … These tools are obsolete and unportable. The command syntax is poorly defined. Consider using the killall, pkill

  -u, --user user
         The next expression is a username.

killall is not marked as outdated in Linux, but it also will not work with numberic UID; only username: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/killall.1.html

killall – kill processes by name

   -u, --user
         Kill only processes the specified user owns.  Command names
         are optional.

I think, any utility used to find process in Linux/Solaris style /proc (procfs) will use full list of processes (doing some readdir of /proc). I think, they will iterate over /proc digital subfolders and check every found process for match.

To get list of users, use getpwent (it will get one user per call).

skill (procps & procps-ng) and killall (psmisc) tools both uses getpwnam library call to parse argument of -u option, and only username will be parsed. pkill (procps & procps-ng) uses both atol and getpwnam to parse -u/-U argument and allow both numeric and textual user specifier.

Method 2

If you pass -1 as the process ID argument to either the kill shell command or the kill C function, then the signal is sent to all the processes it can reach, which in practice means all the processes of the user running the kill command or syscall.

su -c 'kill -TERM -1' bob

In C (error checking omitted):

if (fork() == 0) {
    setuid(uid);
    signal(SIGTERM, SIG_DFL);
    kill(-1, SIGTERM);
}

Method 3

If the pkill function is unavailable on your UNIX / Linux distribution you could run the following command as the root user:

ps -ef | grep username | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill

where username is the user who’s processes you want to delete

Method 4

pgrep -U username|xargs kill -9

Method 5

This has worked nicely for me. You can find all the pid’s of the processes by username by doing ps U <username> and go from there. Try this:

ps U <username> | cut -d " " -f 1 | xargs kill

Method 6

1. Kill all process for user.
2. Wait 2 seconds.
3. Update username and home directory.

 killall -u user; sleep 2; usermod -l newuser -d /home/newuser -m user

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0