Find (and kill) old processes

Solution 1:

YOu can do this with a combination of ps , awk and kill:

ps -eo pid,etime,comm

Gives you a three column output, with the process PID, the elapsed time since the process started, and the command name, without arguments. The elapsed time looks like one of these:

mm:ss
hh:mm:ss
d-hh:mm:ss

Since you want processes that have been running for more than a week, you would look for lines matching that third pattern. You can use awk to filter out the processes by running time and by command name, like this:

ps -eo pid,etime,comm | awk '$2~/^7-/ && $3~/mycommand/ { print $1 }'

which will print the pids of all commands matching 'mycommand' which have been running for more than 7 days. Pipe that list into kill, and you're done:

ps -eo pid,etime,comm | awk '$2~/^7-/ && $3~/mycommand/ { print $1 }' | kill -9

Solution 2:

killall --quiet --older-than 1w process_name