How to Terminate Process from Python Using Pid

How to terminate process from Python using pid?

Using the awesome psutil library it's pretty simple:

p = psutil.Process(pid)
p.terminate()  #or p.kill()

If you don't want to install a new library, you can use the os module:

import os
import signal

os.kill(pid, signal.SIGTERM) #or signal.SIGKILL 

See also the os.kill documentation.

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If you are interested in starting the command python StripCore.py if it is not running, and killing it otherwise, you can use psutil to do this reliably.

Something like:

import psutil
from subprocess import Popen

for process in psutil.process_iter():
    if process.cmdline() == ['python', 'StripCore.py']:
        print('Process found. Terminating it.')
        process.terminate()
        break
else:
    print('Process not found: starting it.')
    Popen(['python', 'StripCore.py'])

Sample run:

$python test_strip.py   #test_strip.py contains the code above
Process not found: starting it.
$python test_strip.py 
Process found. Terminating it.
$python test_strip.py 
Process not found: starting it.
$killall python
$python test_strip.py 
Process not found: starting it.
$python test_strip.py 
Process found. Terminating it.
$python test_strip.py 
Process not found: starting it.

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Note: In previous psutil versions cmdline was an attribute instead of a method.

Getting Python to kill a pid

Read this answer.

BTW a more pythonic solution may be this:

    import re
    import psutil

    convicted = re.compile(r'student|daemon')

    for p in psutil.process_iter():
        if convicted.search(p.name):
            p.terminate()

Edit: To be more accurate I changed the line p.kill() to p.terminate(). The common kill in bash is actually the same as p.terminate() (it sends the TERM signal). But the p.kill() corresponds to kill -9 in bash (it sends the KILL signal).

How do you kill a process in multi-processing with it's PID?

You should probably save the processes in a dict keyed by the process id (pid attribute) for fast lookup. Then you can call terminate on the Process instance:

import multiprocessing as mp

def func():
    ...

process_dict = {}
for _ in range(10):
    process = mp.Process(target=func)
    process.start()
    process_dict[process.pid] = process
...
# Kill a process given a pid:
# This also removes the key from the dictionary:
process = process_dict.pop(pid)
process.terminate()
...
# Wait for remaining processes to end:
for process in process_dict.values():
    process.join()

The assumption is that the pid belongs to one of the processes that you created (otherwise the pop operation will raise a KeyError exception.

The above code assumes you are running under a platform that uses fork to create new processes (such as Linux) and therefore you do not need to place code that creates new processes within a if __name__ == '__main__': block. But you really should tag your question with the platform.

How to kill process on GPUs with PID in nvidia-smi using keyword?

You can grep python in the nvidia-smi and then pass the PID to
the kill -9 command, e.g.

sudo kill -9 $( nvidia-smi | grep 'python' | sed -n
's/|\s*[0-9]\s([0-9])\s.*/\1/p' | sed '/^$/d')

Terminate Python Process and halt it's underlying os.system command line

You can use taskkill but you have to use the /T (and maybe /F) switch so all child processes of the cmd process are killed too. You get the process id of the cmd task via process.pid.

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