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Using killall

By JC » Posted on March 20, 2007 - 11:18am
jasmeet asks:

Question

Is there a simple method to do a one button SIGSTOP/SIGCONT on an app? I tend to have tabs and tabs (and windows and windows) that I’m not ready to close, so I end up doing kill -SIGSTOP pid for Camino. Problem is, the pid is not always gonna be the same.

Answer

kill has a lesser known twin named killall that does just what you wish.

$ killall -STOP Camino

Couple this with Script Menu, and you can achieve what you wish. My only question is…

Why bother?

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JC is a former Mac Genius and Mac-centric IT worker with a background in print advertising. He earned a reputation as a miracle worker when he saved the day at a new business pitch with the arcane knowledge that Apple’s ADB cables were nothing more than poorly shielded S-Video cables.

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Re: Using killall
Anonymous (not verified) on March 20, 2007 - 7:34pm

For those of us from “other” unixes who use a mac as a “unix for the home” type of system this is the same as “pkill” on those other flavors of unix. Exactly the same behavior and operation.

Re: Using killall
jasmeet on March 25, 2007 - 2:30am

Thanks for the answer.

I tend to keep lots of Camino Windows and Tabs. And after a while, my system starts bogging down, and certain things that require processor, etc dont run as smooth.

So, I STOP the app, do my thing, and then CONT it. Problem is, my old method ps -aux | grep Camino doesn’t seem to return results to me anymore. I wonder if it’s broke somehow.

Anyway, thanks a lot! smile

Re: Using killall
JC on March 25, 2007 - 3:33pm
JC's picture

the results of ps aux (the dash isn’t necessary) are truncated by your terminal width. Many processes (especially full applications) will display their full path in that output and can be affected just like you’re seeing.

The -w flag will squelch this behavior and force ps to spew 132 columns of output, regardless of your terminal width. If, in the rare case of 132 columnts still not being enough, you can pass in -ww and it’ll output as many columns as necessary to display all content. So, try ps auxww | grep Camino.

Re: Using killall
DeeKay (not verified) on April 24, 2007 - 11:05pm

That looked like a good solution for my problems with Safari bringing my system to a halt (95% cpu to System and 5% to User..)
But – it doesn’t seem to work for me. If use the App name instead of the pid I get:
$ killall -STOP Firefox
$ No matching processes belonging to you were found

Am I not doing the kill correctly?

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