kill a screen (but not all screens)

Solution 1:

From the man page :

   -X   Send the specified command to a running screen  session.  You  can
        use  the  -d or -r option to tell screen to look only for attached
        or detached screen sessions. Note that this command  doesn't  work
        if the session is password protected.

You can do :

        screen -X -S <sessionid> kill

Solution 2:

If you do a screen -list, you'll notice that each screen name begins with a number, which is the PID of the screen:

 $ screen -list
There are screens on:
        12281.pts-1.jonah       (12/21/2009 07:53:19 PM)        (Attached)
        10455.pts-1.jonah       (12/19/2009 10:55:25 AM)        (Detached)
2 Sockets in /var/run/screen/S-raphink.

From there, just send a KILL signal to this specific PID:

$ kill 12281

and it will kill the specific screen.

---

Solution 3:

If you have several screens with the same name, you can kill them at once:

screen -ls  | egrep "^\s*[0-9]+.ScreenName" | awk -F "." '{print $1}' | xargs kill

• Command screen -ls prints screens with their process number. For example, 4773.test is a screen with process number 4773 and the name test. Sample output:

  6322.ss      (05/23/2018 10:39:08 AM)        (Detached)
  6305.sc  (05/23/2018 10:38:40 AM)        (Detached)
  6265.ScreenName       (05/23/2018 10:37:59 AM)        (Detached)
  6249.ScreenName  (05/23/2018 10:37:50 AM)        (Detached)
  6236.scc        (05/23/2018 10:37:42 AM)        (Detached)
  

• Command egrep filters above sample text sent via piped line |.

• Command awk -F "." '{print $1}' extracts first column of each line. Delimiter between columns is defined as dot (.) by option -F
• Finally command xargs kill will kill all process whose numbers sent via pipe |. xargs is used when we want to execute a command on each of inputs.