xkillall

Name

xkillall — Kills all X windows running a specific command.

Synopsis

Description

This script makes use of the xlsclients and xkill commands to track down processes running on a X display by name and kill them. It is particularily handy in killing X commands which don't have the standard window frames (such as dockapps).

Here is a example of using xkillall to kill all instances of the wmmemload dockapp running on the current X display (as dictated by the DISPLAY environment variable). Verbose output has been enabled via the -v option:

[root@probe ~]# xkillall -c wmmemload -v
Searching for wmmemload in output of /usr/local/bin/xlsclients...
Killing wmmemload on :6.0 with Window ID: 0x2800002
Successfully killed wmmemload with Window ID: 0x2800002
[root@probe ~]#

Here is a example of using xkillall to kill all instances of the wmmemload dockapp running on X display :7.0 with verbose output (notice how two instances were killed in this example):

[root@probe ~]# xkillall --command wmmemload --display :7.0 --verbose
Searching for wmmemload in output of /usr/local/bin/xlsclients...
Killing wmmemload on :7.0 with Window ID: 0x1000002
Successfully killed wmmemload with Window ID: 0x1000002
Killing wmmemload on :7.0 with Window ID: 0x1400002
Successfully killed wmmemload with Window ID: 0x1400002
[root@probe ~]#

Note

This script will pause for a moment if you specify a X display which isn't actually running. It will eventually time out.

Options

The following command line options are available:

-c TEXT | --command TEXT: This option is used to specify the name of the command to be killed. It must match the basename of the command reported by xlsclient -al (the first field next to the Command: label).
[-d TEXT] | [--display TEXT]: By default, we kill the commands found on the current X display (as dictated by the DISPLAY environment variable). If you want to kill a command running on a different X display (or your DISPLAY environment variable isn't set), you can use this option. For example: xkillall -c wmmemload -d ":7.0" could be used to kill all wmmemload dockapps running on X display 7.
[-h [true]|false] | [--help [true]|false]: When this option is specified, xkillall will display a short one line description of xkillall, followed by a short description of each of the supported command line options. After displaying this information xkillall will terminate.
[-H [true]|false] | [--help-long [true]|false]: This option will attempt to pull up additional xkillall documentation within a text based web browser. You can force which browser we use setting the environment variable TEXTBROWSER, otherwise, we will search for some common ones.
[-v [true]|false] | [--verbose [true]|false]: When you set this option to true, xkillall will produce additional output. This is typically used for diagnostic purposes to help track down when things go wrong.
[--version [true]|false]: If this option is specified, the version number of the script is displayed.

Files

/usr/local/share/xkillall: Directory containing resource files used by xkillall.

Environment

TEXTBROWSER: This controls what text based browser is used to display help information about the script. If not set, we will search your system for available text-based browsers (Ex: elinks, lynx ...).

Authors

Paul Blankenbaker created initial version.