fk: redux

Brett — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:49:15 +0000

Just a quick change to my post on the bash function fk that I’ve been using. A small modification has greatly improved its usability: make the cancel option always be first in the menu. Just move “Cancel” before the $(fp $1) bit. It’s a little odd that I didn’t do that to begin with…


fp () { #find and list processes matching a case-insensitive partial-match string
        ps Ao pid,comm|awk '{match($0,/[^\/]+$/); print substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH)": "$1}'|grep -i $1|grep -v grep
}

fk () { 
    IFS=$'\n'
    PS3='Kill which process? (1 to cancel): '
    select OPT in "Cancel" $(fp $1); do
        if [ $OPT != "Cancel" ]; then
            kill $(echo $OPT|awk '{print $NF}')
        fi
        break
    done
    unset IFS
}

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at fk: redux

fk: a useful bash function

Brett — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:59:53 +0000

This is a function from my OS X .bash_profile. ‘fk’ is short for Find and Kill, and it lets you do a quick search of your running processes for a case-insensitive partial match of the first parameter passed to it. It’s useful for quickly finding a process without worrying about its capitalization or full spelling, and without having to sift through (or manually grep) a long ps ax list.


fp () { #find and list processes matching a case-insensitive partial-match string
        ps Ao pid,comm|awk '{match($0,/[^\/]+$/); print substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH)": "$1}'|grep -i $1|grep -v grep
}

fk () { # build menu to kill process
    IFS=$'\n'
    PS3='Kill which process? '
    select OPT in $(fp $1) "Cancel"; do
        if [ $OPT != "Cancel" ]; then
            kill $(echo $OPT|awk '{print $NF}')
        fi
        break
    done
    unset IFS
}

On OS X (and similar Linux systems), you should have a file in your home folder (cd ~) called .bash_profile. Just copy and paste this code at the bottom of that file, and then run source ~/.bash_profile in Terminal. Now (and every time you log in) you can run fk process, where process is a partial name of a running application or UNIX process. You’ll get a menu with the matches, and you can kill a specific process by typing its number at the prompt. The last option is always “Cancel,” which will terminate the command without taking any action. I’d love to hear about any improvements you make to this code… I’m far from a Bash pro.

Originally posted on BrettTerpstra.com at fk: a useful bash function

Brett Terpstrafunction - Brett Terpstra

fk: redux

fk: a useful bash function