Question

Is there any way to set the process name of a shell script? This is needed for killing this script with the killall command.

Answer 1

Here’s a way to do it, it is a hack/workaround but it works pretty good. Feel free to tweak it to your needs, it certainly needs some checks on the symbolic link creation or using a tmp folder to avoid possible race conditions (if they are problematic in your case).

Demonstration

wrapper

#!/bin/bash
script="./dummy"
newname="./killme"

rm -iv "$newname"

ln -s "$script" "$newname"

exec "$newname" "$@"

dummy

#!/bin/bash
echo "I am $0"
echo "my params: $@"

ps aux | grep bash

echo "sleeping 10s... Kill me!"
sleep 10

Test it using:

chmod +x dummy wrapper
./wrapper some params

In another terminal, kill it using:

killall killme

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Notes

Make sure you can write in your current folder (current working directory).

If your current command is:

/path/to/file -q --params somefile1 somefile2

Set the script variable in wrapper to /path/to/file (instead of ./dummy) and call wrapper like this:

./wrapper -q --params somefile1 somefile2