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Linux kill all active process except your login session with killall5 command

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: August 22, 2007]

Almost all UNIX SystemV version has killall command which is used to kill all active processes i.e. terminates all processes with open files so that the mounted file systems will be unbusied and can be unmounted.

However Linux killall command used to kill processes by name (if no signal name is specified, SIGTERM is sent). If you missed old good SysV killall command, try killall5 command under any Linux distro. killall5 is nothing but the UNIX SystemV killall command. It sends a signal to all processes except kernel threads and the processes in its own session, so it won’t kill the shell that is running the script it was called from.

Just type killall5 and every active process will get killed except your login session:
# netstat
# netstat -tulpn
# killall5
# netstat -tulpn

As usual,
(a) The killall command can be run only by the super-user.
(b) Use this command with caution

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