Kill all processes for a given user

Question

Is there a reliable way to kill all the processes of a given user  kill -1  SIGKILL  as that user will work  unless a rogue process of that user kills the killing process first  The best I can find so far is to loop through system  ps -u   for that user and kill the processes that way  but that seems really hacky and inefficient   EDIT  To clarify  I m specifically asking for a POSIX-compatable solution  For some reason I thought tagging the question posix would put that in the title

User · Accepted Answer

Just  temporarily  killed my Macbook with  killall -u pu -m     where pu is my userid  Watch the dot at the end of the command   Also try  pkill -u pu   or   ps -o pid -u pu   xargs kill -1

User · Answer

The following kills all the processes created by this user   kill  -9  -1

User · Answer

On Debian LINUX  I use  ps -o pid  -u username   xargs sudo kill -9   With -o pid  the ps header is supressed  and the output is only the pid list  As far as I know  Debian shell is POSIX compliant

User · Answer

Here is a one liner that does this  just replace username with the username you want to kill things for  Don t even think on putting root there   pkill -9 -u  id -u username    Note  if you want to be nice remove -9  but it will not kill all kinds of processes

User · Answer

What about iterating on the  proc virtual file system   http   linux die net man 5 proc

[posix] Kill all processes for a given user

Examples related to posix