Unable to terminate a job without opening it

Question

I run the following code unsuccessfully

sudo killall %4

where %4 is my Vim session.

How can you terminate a job without foregrounding it?

Answer 1

I believe you want "kill" instead of "killall". I tested under tcsh like this:

home% cat
^Z
Suspended
home% kill %1
home% 
[1]    Terminated                    cat

Furthermore, I doubt this would work with sudo because sudo would invoke a new shell, wouldn't it? And in that shell, %4 would not be defined.

home% cat
^Z
Suspended
home% sudo kill %1
Password:
kill: illegal process id: %1

If you really need to sudo, you can try this:

home% jobs -l
[1] + 26318 Suspended cat
home% sudo kill 26318

Answer 2

Try kill %4 instead. The unix shell uses %x as variables for currently running processes. To see the processes you can use with the %x syntax, use jobs. Killall is a wrapper around "kill" that is basically the equivalent of `ps -aux | grep | cut -f2 -d " " | xargs kill' or the like if you're a shell junky.

No, sorry, that shell command won't quite work, but it does illustrate how killall works =p. It simply kills every process it can that matches the string you provide.

Also, try `man kill' to learn more about kill. Particularly, kill -9 you may find useful. It's sorta the equivalent of 'force quit'.