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PKILL(1)                    General Commands Manual                   PKILL(1)

NAME
     pkill, pgrep, prenice - find or signal processes by name

SYNOPSIS
     pgrep [-fiLlnqvx] [-d delim] [-F pidfile] [-G gid] [-g pgrp] [-P ppid]
           [-s sid] [-t tty] [-U uid] [-u euid] pattern ...
     pkill [-signal] [-fiLlnvx] [-F pidfile] [-G gid] [-g pgrp] [-P ppid]
           [-s sid] [-t tty] [-U uid] [-u euid] pattern ...
     prenice [-l] priority pattern ...

DESCRIPTION
     The pgrep command searches the process table on the running system and
     prints the process IDs of all processes that match the criteria given on
     the command line.

     The pkill command searches the process table on the running system and
     signals all processes that match the criteria given on the command line.

     The prenice command searches the process table on the running system and
     sets the priority of all processes that match the criteria given on the
     command line.

     By default, matching applies to any substring of the command name
     (argv[0]), but options may be used to change this.  Patterns are
     specified using extended regular expressions (see re_format(7)).

     The following options are available for pkill and pgrep:

     -d delim          Specify a delimiter to be printed between each process
                       ID.  The default is a newline.  This option can only be
                       used with the pgrep command.

     -f                Match against full argument lists.  The default is to
                       match against process names.

     -F pidfile        Restrict matches to processes which pid is stored in
                       pidfile file.

     -G gid            Restrict matches to processes with a real group ID in
                       the comma-separated list gid.

     -g pgrp           Restrict matches to processes with a process group ID
                       in the comma-separated list pgrp.  The value zero is
                       taken to mean the process group ID of the running pgrep
                       or pkill command.

     -i                Ignore case distinctions in both the process table and
                       the supplied pattern.

     -L                The pidfile given for the -F option must be locked with
                       the flock(2) syscall or created with pidfile_lock(3).

     -l                Long output.  Print the process name in addition to the
                       process ID for each matching process.  If used in
                       conjunction with -f, print the process ID and the full
                       argument list for each matching process.

     -n                Match only the most recently created process, if any.

     -P ppid           Restrict matches to processes with a parent process ID
                       in the comma-separated list ppid.

     -s sid            Restrict matches to processes with a session ID in the
                       comma-separated list sid.  The value zero is taken to
                       mean the session ID of the running pgrep or pkill
                       command.

     -t tty            Restrict matches to processes associated with a
                       terminal in the comma-separated list tty.  Terminal
                       names may be specified as a fully qualified path, in
                       the form `ttyXX', or `pts/N', (where XX is any pair of
                       letters, and N is a number), or the shortened forms
                       `XX' or `N'.  A single dash (`-') matches processes not
                       associated with a terminal.

     -U uid            Restrict matches to processes with a real user ID in
                       the comma-separated list uid.

     -u euid           Restrict matches to processes with an effective user ID
                       in the comma-separated list euid.

     -v                Reverse the sense of the matching; display processes
                       that do not match the given criteria.

     -x                Require an exact match of the process name, or argument
                       list if -f is given.  The default is to match any
                       substring.

     -signal           A non-negative decimal number or symbolic signal name
                       specifying the signal to be sent instead of the default
                       TERM.  This option is valid only when given as the
                       first argument to pkill.

     The following option is also available for pgrep:

     -q                Quiet; do not write anything to standard output.

     The -l flag is also available for prenice.

     Note that a running pgrep, pkill, or prenice process will never consider
     itself or system processes (kernel threads) as a potential match.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES
     The Sun Solaris implementation utilised procfs to obtain process
     information.  This implementation utilises kvm(3) instead.

EXIT STATUS
     pgrep, pkill, and prenice return one of the following values upon exit:

     0    One or more processes were matched.

     1    No processes were matched.

     2    Invalid options were specified on the command line.

     3    An internal error occurred.

SEE ALSO
     grep(1), kill(1), ps(1), kill(2), sigaction(2), kvm(3), re_format(7),
     signal(7), renice(8)

HISTORY
     pkill and pgrep first appeared in NetBSD 1.6.  They are modelled after
     utilities of the same name that appeared in Sun Solaris 7.

     prenice was introduced in NetBSD 6.0.

AUTHORS
     Andrew Doran <ad@NetBSD.org>.

NetBSD 11.99                    October 6, 2024                   NetBSD 11.99