pkill by default sends the SIGTERM signal to processes to stop. Here's a list of the signals you can send a process. You can send them by name or number typically:
$ kill -l 1) SIGHUP 2) SIGINT 3) SIGQUIT 4) SIGILL 5) SIGTRAP 6) SIGABRT 7) SIGBUS 8) SIGFPE 9) SIGKILL 10) SIGUSR1 11) SIGSEGV 12) SIGUSR2 13) SIGPIPE 14) SIGALRM 15) SIGTERM 16) SIGSTKFLT 17) SIGCHLD 18) SIGCONT 19) SIGSTOP 20) SIGTSTP 21) SIGTTIN 22) SIGTTOU 23) SIGURG 24) SIGXCPU 25) SIGXFSZ 26) SIGVTALRM 27) SIGPROF 28) SIGWINCH 29) SIGIO 30) SIGPWR 31) SIGSYS 34) SIGRTMIN 35) SIGRTMIN+1 36) SIGRTMIN+2 37) SIGRTMIN+3 38) SIGRTMIN+4 39) SIGRTMIN+5 40) SIGRTMIN+6 41) SIGRTMIN+7 42) SIGRTMIN+8 43) SIGRTMIN+9 44) SIGRTMIN+10 45) SIGRTMIN+11 46) SIGRTMIN+12 47) SIGRTMIN+13 48) SIGRTMIN+14 49) SIGRTMIN+15 50) SIGRTMAX-14 51) SIGRTMAX-13 52) SIGRTMAX-12 53) SIGRTMAX-11 54) SIGRTMAX-10 55) SIGRTMAX-9 56) SIGRTMAX-8 57) SIGRTMAX-7 58) SIGRTMAX-6 59) SIGRTMAX-5 60) SIGRTMAX-4 61) SIGRTMAX-3 62) SIGRTMAX-2 63) SIGRTMAX-1 64) SIGRTMAX
So you're sending signal # 15. If the processes are not responding to this signal then you may need to use signal #9, pkill -SIGKILL.
From the man page of pkill:
-signal
Defines the signal to send to each matched process. Either the numeric or the symbolic signal name can be used. (pkill only.)
Issues with pkill
The OP mentioned that he was unsuccessful in getting pkill -SIGKILL "run_tcp" to work. We initially thought that the issue had to do with pkill potentially killing itself before it had finished killing all the "run_tcp" processes.
But that was hard to accept given a foot note in the pkill man page:
The running pgrep or pkill process will never report itself as a match.
In addition to that, @Gilles left a comment basically saying the same thing, that pkill just does not kill itself. Then he gave us a pretty big clue as to what was actually going on.
Here's an example that demonstrates what the OP and myself were missing:
step 1 - make a sleepy.bash script
#!/bin/bash sleep 10000
step 2 - load up some fake sleep tasks
$ for i in `seq 1 5`;do bash sleepy.bash & done [1] 12703 [2] 12704 [3] 12705 [4] 12706 [5] 12707
step 3 - check the running tasks
$ ps -eaf|egrep "sleep 10000|sleepy" saml 12703 29636 0 21:48 pts/16 00:00:00 bash sleepy.bash saml 12704 29636 0 21:48 pts/16 00:00:00 bash sleepy.bash saml 12705 29636 0 21:48 pts/16 00:00:00 bash sleepy.bash saml 12706 29636 0 21:48 pts/16 00:00:00 bash sleepy.bash saml 12707 29636 0 21:48 pts/16 00:00:00 bash sleepy.bash saml 12708 12704 0 21:48 pts/16 00:00:00 sleep 10000 saml 12709 12707 0 21:48 pts/16 00:00:00 sleep 10000 saml 12710 12705 0 21:48 pts/16 00:00:00 sleep 10000 saml 12711 12703 0 21:48 pts/16 00:00:00 sleep 10000 saml 12712 12706 0 21:48 pts/16 00:00:00 sleep 10000
step 4 - try using my pkill
$ pkill -SIGTERM sleepy.bash
step 5 - what happened?
Doing the ps command from above, we see that none of the processes were killed, just like the OPs issue. What's going on?
Turns out this is an issue in how we were attempting to make use of pkill. The command:
pkill -SIGTERM "sleepy.bash"
was looking for a process by the name of "sleepy.bash". Well there aren't any processes by that name. There's processes that are named "bash sleepy.bash" though. So pkill was looking for processes to kill and not finding any and then exiting.
So if we slightly adjust the pkill we're using to this:
$ pkill -SIGTERM -f "sleepy.bash" [1] Terminated bash sleepy.bash [2] Terminated bash sleepy.bash [3] Terminated bash sleepy.bash [4]- Terminated bash sleepy.bash [5]+ Terminated bash sleepy.bash
Now we get the effect we were looking for. What the difference? We made use of the -f switch to pkill which makes pkill use the entire command line path when matching vs. just the process name.
from pkill man page
-f The pattern is normally only matched against the process name. When -f is set, the full command line is used.
Alternative methods
kill, ps
This method is pretty verbose but does the job as well:
kill -9 $(ps -ef|grep "run_tcp"|grep -v "grep"|awk '{print $2}')
pgrep w/ pkill & killall
You can use either pgrep to feed a list of PIDs to pkill or make use of killall instead.
Examples
# pgrep solution $ pgrep "run_tcp" | pkill -SIGKILL # killall killall -SIGKILL -r run_tcp
References
pgrep "run_tcp_sender.sh"return the list of processes you want to kill, or does it just return an empty list because the processes are all listed asbash run_tcp_sender.sh ...?