xargs kill: Failure

Question

Consider the following command:

ps ax | ack -i "[p]rocessname" | awk '{print $1}'

This lists the PID's of the processes matching processname.

When I attempt to kill each of these processes like this,

ps ax | ack -i "[p]rocessname" | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill

I get the following errors:

kill: 90632: Operation not permitted
kill: 90642: Operation not permitted
kill: 90724: Operation not permitted
kill: 90732: Operation not permitted

I'm thinking xargs might be treating the pids as Strings instead of integers or something in that manner. Or perhaps I should use cut instead of awk here (I'm new to awk). Any advice?

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 20 '14 at 17:55

3

The command is fine. You simply don't have permission to kill the processes returned by awk. In Unix, only the root user can kill processes owned by another user.

answered Jan 20 '14 at 17:55

chepner

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Ah, thanks for pointing that out! I will modify the command accordingly. – krystah Jan 20 '14 at 18:08

xargs kill: Failure

1 Answers1