In the above scenario, I have to kill all the process except ps and sh . How to do that ?

jproctor wrote:

Sorry to appear thick, but could you give an example of processname-patern
thanks for posting this great help jproctor

you can use pgrep and pkill

kill -9 `ps -ef | grep <process-name> | grep -v grep | awk ‘{print $2}’`

Just make sure that you keyin the correct process name in the above command.

always try a kill (without -9) first

In the most basic usage, grep will search through text looking for the search string. If you want to look for commands containing the string ‘http’ you would simply use:

..... | grep http | ....

Grep stands for global regular expression parser and is a magnificently powerful tool. The important thing to take out of that mouthful is ‘regular expression’ which is a formal language for representing elaborate wildcards for searching. For example, a period matches any single character, so .at would match bat, cat, rat, and so on. Used in a grep statement, it would match that regular expression anywhere in the line, so it would also match brat and bats. Regular expressions would be a great idea for a series of rec.pes.