Ladies and gentlemen, presenting: kgrep – kill-grep

This is a bash function which allows you to type in a search term and kill matching processes. You will be prompted to kill each matching process for your searchterm.

You can also optionally provide a specific signal to use for the kill commands (default: 15)

Usage: kgrep [<signal>] searchterm

Signal may be -2, -9, or -HUP (this could be generalised but I CBF).

search term is anything grep recognises.

kgrep() {
    #grep for processes and prompt whether they should be killed
    if [ -z "$*" ]; then
        echo "Usage: $0 [-signal] searchterm"
        echo -e "\nSearches for processes matching  and prompts to kill them."
        echo -e "signal may be:\n\t-2\n\t-9\n\t-HUP\n to send a different signal (default: TERM)"
        return 0
    fi  
    SIG="-15"
	#yes, this could be more sophisticated
    if [ "$1" == "-9" ] ||  
        [ "$1" == "-2" ] ||
        [ "$1" == "-HUP" ]; then 
        SIG="$1"
        shift
    fi  
    #we need to unset the field separator if ^C is pressed:
    trap "unset IFS; return 0" KILL
    trap "unset IFS; return 0" QUIT
    trap "unset IFS; return 0" INT 
    trap "unset IFS; return 0" TERM

    IFS=$'\n'
	for l in `ps aux | grep "$*" | grep -v grep `; do
        echo $l
        pid=`echo $l | awk '{print $2}'`
        read -p "Kill $pid (n)? " a
        if [[ "$a" =~ [Yy]([Ee][Ss])? ]]; then
            echo kill $SIG $pid
            kill $SIG $pid
        fi
    done
    unset IFS
}