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Helped me when trying to kill non existing processes to prevent the kill foo_pid failed: no such process message

Koen.
– Koen.

2012-08-12 12:58:05 +00:00
Commented Aug 12, 2012 at 12:58
@Koen. Yes, but this has nothing do with background jobs. You can silence any error message issued by kill itself - as with any command - with 2>/dev/null. The reason this answer isn't effective with background jobs is that Bash itself asynchronously, after the kill command has completed, outputs a status message about the killed job, which you cannot suppress directly - unless you use wait, as in the accepted answer.

mklement0
– mklement0

2016-07-11 04:03:00 +00:00
Commented Jul 11, 2016 at 4:03
@mklement0 I actually tried this today to find that only kill $foo_pid 2>/dev/null worked in silencing the error messages.

Alaska
– Alaska

2022-01-08 01:15:39 +00:00
Commented Jan 8, 2022 at 1:15
@Alaska, as far as I can tell, the problem only occurs when the kill command is used to kill a job interactively. Inside scripts job-control messages such as the shown in the question do not print (unless you source the script from the interactive prompt). (This contradicts the question). In other words: if you call kill $foo_pid from a (non-sourced) script, kill $foo_pid 2>/dev/null is sufficient (to cover the case where $foo_pid no longer exists). Interactively (or in a script sourced interactively), you need { kill $foo_pid && wait $foo_pid; } 2>/dev/null

mklement0
– mklement0

2022-01-08 03:07:29 +00:00
Commented Jan 8, 2022 at 3:07

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