Linux – How to Find and Kill Old Processes

debiankilllinuxprocess

Basically I need to be able scan the process tree and find processes that match a certain name and started running more than a week a go. Once I have them, I need to kill them. All the processes are still seen as in a running state by the system, just not using any system time. They'll usually sit forever in this state too.

Ideally I'd like something similar to find, but for processes.

System is Debian linux and this will be scripted and run by cron so I've no real issues with something large but understandable.

Best Answer

YOu can do this with a combination of ps , awk and kill:

ps -eo pid,etime,comm

Gives you a three column output, with the process PID, the elapsed time since the process started, and the command name, without arguments. The elapsed time looks like one of these:

mm:ss
hh:mm:ss
d-hh:mm:ss

Since you want processes that have been running for more than a week, you would look for lines matching that third pattern. You can use awk to filter out the processes by running time and by command name, like this:

ps -eo pid,etime,comm | awk '$2~/^7-/ && $3~/mycommand/ { print $1 }'

which will print the pids of all commands matching 'mycommand' which have been running for more than 7 days. Pipe that list into kill, and you're done:

ps -eo pid,etime,comm | awk '$2~/^7-/ && $3~/mycommand/ { print $1 }' | kill -9
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