Question

How can I kill all my instances from the command line? Is there a command for this or must I script it?

Answer 1

As far as I know there isn’t an ‘all’ switch for the ec2-terminate-instances command. So you probably need to script it. It won’t be that hard. You only need to generate a comma separated list of your instances.

This is a python script I am using:

import sys import time from boto.ec2.connection import EC2Connection  def main():     conn = EC2Connection('', '')     instances = conn.get_all_instances()     print instances     for reserv in instances:         for inst in reserv.instances:             if inst.state == u'running':                 print 'Terminating instance %s' % inst                 inst.stop()  if __name__ == '__main__':     main() 

It uses boto library. This is not necessary for the specific task (a simple shell script will be enough), but it may be handy in many occasions.

Finally are you aware of Elasticfox extension for Firefox? This is by far the easiest way to access EC2.