Day 15 - Master Process Termination Using ps, grep, awk, and xargs

🔧 Day 15 of my DevOps journey focused on managing running processes. I learned to find and kill Apache HTTPD processes using command-line tools like ps, grep, awk, and xargs.

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👀 Step-by-Step Process Management

✅ 1. List All Running Processes

ps aux          # Detailed view (username, PID, %CPU, command)
ps -ef          # Full-format listing (UID, PID, PPID, etc.)

🔎 2. Filter Apache Processes

ps -ef | grep httpd
ps -ef | grep httpd | grep -v 'grep'

grep -v 'grep' removes the grep command from the result.

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❌ 3. Kill a Single Process

kill 1420
kill -9 1476  # Force kill

🔁 4. Kill All httpd Processes at Once

ps -ef | grep httpd | grep -v 'grep' | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

Here's what each part does:

• ps -ef — list all processes

• grep httpd — search for Apache processes

• grep -v grep — exclude grep itself

• awk '{print $2}' — extract the PID (process ID)

• xargs kill -9 — forcefully kill each PID

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🚀 5. Restart Apache

systemctl start httpd

Then verify again:

ps -ef | grep httpd | grep -v grep

🧠 What I Learned

✅ How to find processes using ps
✅ Use grep, awk, xargs to dynamically extract and act on data
✅ Kill processes by PID or in batch
✅ Restart services after killing
✅ Useful for troubleshooting stuck or zombie services in production

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🛠️ Real-World Application

This is critical knowledge for DevOps engineers when:

• Dealing with rogue or hanging processes

• Managing servers without a GUI

• Writing shell scripts to automate process handling

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🔮 What's Next?

Day 16 will focus onArchiving Jenkins Logs with tar, zip & unzip