NAME
killall — kill all active processes
SYNOPSIS
/usr/sbin/killall
[signal]
DESCRIPTION
killall
is a procedure used by
/usr/sbin/shutdown
to kill all active processes
not directly related to the shutdown procedure.
killall
is chiefly used to terminate all processes with open files
so that the mounted file systems are no longer busy and can be unmounted.
killall
sends the specified
signal
to all user processes in the system,
with the following exceptions:
all processes (including background processes)
associated with the terminal from which
killall
was invoked;
any
ps -ef
process, if owned by
root;
any
sed -e
process, if owned by
root;
killall
obtains its process information from
ps,
and therefore may not be able to perfectly identify
which processes to signal (see
ps(1)).
If no
signal
is specified, a default of
9
(kill) is used.
killall
is invoked automatically by
shutdown.
The use of
shutdown
is recommended over using
killall
by itself (see
shutdown(1M)).
STANDARDS CONFORMANCE
killall: SVID2, SVID3