| Operating system | Unix, Unix-like |
|---|---|
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Type | Command |
pkill (see pgrep ) is a command-line utility initially written for use with the Solaris 7 operating system in 1998. It has since been reimplemented for Linux and some BSDs.
As with the kill and killall commands, pkill is used to send signals to processes. The pkill command allows the use of extended regular expression patterns and other matching criteria.
Kill the most recently created acroread process:
pkill -n acroread Send a USR1 signal to acroread process:
pkill -USR1 acroread Some other unix commands related to process management and killing include:
Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. First released in 1989, it has been used as the default login shell for most Linux distributions. A version is also available for Windows 10 via the Windows Subsystem for Linux. It is also the default user shell in Solaris 11. Bash was also the default shell in all versions of Apple macOS prior to the 2019 release of macOS Catalina, which changed the default shell to zsh, although Bash currently remains available as an alternative shell.
grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command g/re/p, which has the same effect. grep was originally developed for the Unix operating system, but later available for all Unix-like systems and some others such as OS-9.
The system utility fsck is a tool for checking the consistency of a file system in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. A similar command, CHKDSK, exists in Microsoft Windows and its ancestor, MS-DOS.
In software development, Make is a build automation tool that automatically builds executable programs and libraries from source code by reading files called Makefiles which specify how to derive the target program. Though integrated development environments and language-specific compiler features can also be used to manage a build process, Make remains widely used, especially in Unix and Unix-like operating systems.
The archiver, also known simply as ar, is a Unix utility that maintains groups of files as a single archive file. Today, ar is generally used only to create and update static library files that the link editor or linker uses and for generating .deb packages for the Debian family; it can be used to create archives for any purpose, but has been largely replaced by tar for purposes other than static libraries. An implementation of ar is included as one of the GNU Binutils.
The software utility cron also known as cron job is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. Users who set up and maintain software environments use cron to schedule jobs to run periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals. It typically automates system maintenance or administration—though its general-purpose nature makes it useful for things like downloading files from the Internet and downloading email at regular intervals.
dd is a command-line utility for Unix and Unix-like operating systems, the primary purpose of which is to convert and copy files.
In most Unix and Unix-like operating systems, the ps program displays the currently-running processes. A related Unix utility named top provides a real-time view of the running processes.
In computing, netstat is a command-line network utility that displays network connections for Transmission Control Protocol, routing tables, and a number of network interface and network protocol statistics. It is available on Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and Unix-like operating systems including macOS, Linux, Solaris and BSD. It is also available on IBM OS/2 and on Microsoft Windows NT-based operating systems including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10.
In computing, kill is a command that is used in several popular operating systems to send signals to running processes.
These tables provide a comparison of operating systems, of computer devices, as listing general and technical information for a number of widely used and currently available PC or handheld operating systems. The article "Usage share of operating systems" provides a broader, and more general, comparison of operating systems that includes servers, mainframes and supercomputers.
DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework originally created by Sun Microsystems for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. Originally developed for Solaris, it has since been released under the free Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in OpenSolaris and its descendant illumos, and has been ported to several other Unix-like systems.
The file command is a standard program of Unix and Unix-like operating systems for recognizing the type of data contained in a computer file.
The proc filesystem (procfs) is a special filesystem in Unix-like operating systems that presents information about processes and other system information in a hierarchical file-like structure, providing a more convenient and standardized method for dynamically accessing process data held in the kernel than traditional tracing methods or direct access to kernel memory. Typically, it is mapped to a mount point named /proc at boot time. The proc file system acts as an interface to internal data structures about running processes in the kernel. In Linux, it can also be used to obtain information about the kernel and to change certain kernel parameters at runtime (sysctl).
In computing, a shebang is the character sequence consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation mark at the beginning of a script. It is also called sha-bang, hashbang, pound-bang, or hash-pling.
killall is a command line utility available on Unix-like systems. There are two very different implementations.
pgrep is a command-line utility initially written for use with the Solaris 7 operating system by Mike Shapiro. It has since been available in illumos and reimplemented for the Linux and BSDs. It searches for all the named processes that can be specified as extended regular expression patterns, and—by default—returns their process ID. Alternatives include pidof and ps.
chsh is a command on Unix-like operating systems that is used to change a login shell. Users can either supply the pathname of the shell that they wish to change to on the command line, or supply no arguments, in which case chsh allows the user to change the shell interactively.
Toybox is a free and open-source software implementation of over 200 Unix command line utilities such as ls, cp, and mv. The Toybox project was started in 2006, and became a 0BSD licensed BusyBox alternative. Toybox is included with Android 6.0 "Marshmallow" and all later Android versions, and also used to build Android on Linux and macOS. All of the tools are tested on Linux, and many of them also work on BSD and macOS.
Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.
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| Processes | |
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| Text processing | |
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