Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@marcoagner
Last active May 11, 2022 20:11
Show Gist options
  • Star 9 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 1 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save marcoagner/9926309 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save marcoagner/9926309 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Python script to kill a process by its name
import os, signal
def check_kill_process(pstring):
for line in os.popen("ps ax | grep " + pstring + " | grep -v grep"):
fields = line.split()
pid = fields[0]
os.kill(int(pid), signal.SIGKILL)
@abelpc
Copy link

abelpc commented Oct 4, 2016

'psutil' is not always 'util' for interactive processes called by bash scripts, for example. The above script takes this into consideration, killing them, but not mistakenly killing a random '/bin/bash', for example..

@scriptedp0ison
Copy link

or you could just import the subprocess module, have the user enter a string based input, convert it to int, then via the sys module [ sys.stdin.readline()] or raw_input depending on the version of python, then create a variable to store the input with the 'killall' command, through the subprocess.call() function

@ryancasler
Copy link

Where do you list the name of the process you want to kill?!?!?! OMG....I've been searching for an hour!!!!

@ageron
Copy link

ageron commented Jan 16, 2019

You can use psutil's process_iter() to list processes, and use each process's name() and cmdline() method to get its name and command line arguments.
For example, this gist implements a few functions that list processes by name or by filtering on their command line arguments.

@datalifenyc
Copy link

@marcoagner Perfect solution for my selenium issue with driver.quit() not terminating chromedriver.

macOS: Catalina  
Python: 3.7.4
ChromeDriver: 80.0.3987.106

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment