Question 27108 in CentOS Question posted in
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pkill doesn't kill process – CentOS

I have a process running called productivity

[root@productivity ~]# netstat -tunlp
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name    
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      1009514/sshd        
tcp6       0      0 :::8443                 :::*                    LISTEN      2803472/productivit 
tcp6       0      0 :::443                  :::*                    LISTEN      1017657/httpd       
tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN      1017657/httpd       
tcp6       0      0 :::22                   :::*                    LISTEN      1009514/sshd        
udp        0      0 127.0.0.1:323           0.0.0.0:*                           1009281/chronyd     
udp6       0      0 ::1:323                 :::*                                1009281/chronyd

I periodically restart the service to renew the let’s encrypt certs

[root@productivity ~]# cat restart-productivity.sh 
#!/bin/sh
pkill "productivity"
bash -c "exec -a productivity java -jar productivity.jar -Dkeystore.location=./ssl/productivity.to.keystore . & disown &"

This worked like a charm for months. Now, even when I manually run pkill productivity the service does not get killed. I can only kill the service by calling kill PID. This does work but is useless for automation.

I’m running on CentOS 8 and I’m clueless why it stopped working. Can anyone help me out here?

UPDATE

[root@productivity ecommerce]# ps aux | grep productivity
root     2803472  1.3 10.3 2648228 204168 pts/1  Sl   20:24   0:21 productivity -jar productivity.jar -Dkeystore.location=./ssl/productivity.to.keystore .
root     2803848  0.0  0.0  11800  1152 pts/1    S+   20:49   0:00 grep --color=auto productivity
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2

Answers


  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    The solution that worked for me in the end was

    #!/bin/sh
PID=`pidof productivity`
kill $PID
bash -c "exec -a productivity java -jar productivity.jar . & disown &"

  2. 0

    I use kill to send SIGTERM to most processes.
    I don’t use pkill any more, instead I prefer pgrep combined with kill …

    pgrep -io "PROCESSNAME" | xargs kill

    The -i is to check for case insensitive
    and -o is to output first process ID only.

    You can use this as an alias in your ~/.bashrc_aliases or direct in your ~/.bashrc.
    For example I use that to kill discord cause it will not halt on its own.

    alias kill_discord='pgrep -io discord | xargs kill'

    Just my 2cents.

    Update

    Rule of thumb for killing processes.

    1. SIGTERM is trying to shutdown a process the normal way.
    2. when SIGTERM doesn’t work you can try SIGINT. This is an interrupt like CTRL-C.
    3. if neither of those signal work you can try SIGHUP. This signal is send to processes when closing a terminal. Daemons will reload their config-files.
    4. Last but not least there is SIGKILL. This will kill any process no matter what, and it should only be used when a process isn’t responding any more.
    kill {-2|-INT|-SIGINT|-s 2|-s INT|-s SIGINT|--signal 2|--signal INT|--signal SIGINT} [PID]
kill {-1|-HUP|-SIGHUP|-s 1|-s HUP|-s SIGHUP|--signal 1|--signal HUP|--signal SIGHUP} [PID]
kill {-9|-KILL|-SIGKILL|-s 9|-s KILL|-s SIGKILL|--signal 9|--signal KILL|--singal SIGKILL} [PID]
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