Question

I want a way to kill a random process with a name (eg a random perl process).

What would be the best way of doing this?

I was thinkign of using something like this:

ps aux | grep PROCESS-NAME

to a file, then find a random line number, get the second column (process ID?) and kill that.

For my use it doesn’t actually need to be a random one, as long as it kills one of the processes. Making it random just makes it better.

Answer 1

Bash one-liner :-p

kill `ps auxww | grep zsh | awk '{print $2}' | while read line; do echo "$RANDOM $line"; done | sort | cut -d ' ' -f 2 | head -n 1`