I want a script which kills the instance(s) of ssh which are run with the -D argument (setting up a local proxy).
Manually, I do ps -A | grep -i ssh, look for the instance(s) with -D, and kill -9 {id} each one.
But what does that look like in bash script form?
(I am on Mac OS X but will install any necessary commands via port)
Run pgrep -f "ssh.*-D" and see if that returns the correct process ID. If it does, simply change pgrep to pkill and keep the same options and pattern
Also, you shouldn't use kill -9 aka SIGKILL unless absolutely necessary because programs can't trap SIGKILL to clean up after themselves before they exit. I only use kill -9 after first trying -1 -2 and -3.
for loop that does kill -i for each i ;)
pgrep is not native on OSX, you have to get it from a third party. The previous thread on the topic has proposals and alternatives.
-a flag to pgrep which makes it print not only the process id but also the command (including arguments). This way it is very easy to verify that only desired processes are matched.
Also,
kill `pgrep -f "ssh.*-D"`
pkill
You can leverage the proc file system to gather the information. For example:
for proc in $(grep -irl "ssh.*-D" /proc/*/cmdline | grep -v "self"); do if [ -f $proc ]; then cat $proc && echo ""; fi; done
It's not perfect, you'll want a more exclusive regex (especially if you are killing processes) but echo $proc | awk -F'/' '{ print $3 }' will show you the PID of the process(es).
/proc. And there's already a robust tool to do this out there, called pgrep (available natively at least on Solaris and Linux).
pgrepandpkillare commands to reliably find or kill processes by name under Solaris and Linux.