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How to kill all tmux sessions (or at least multiple sessions) from the (Ubuntu) CLI?

When I do ps aux | grep tmux I see 3 processes:

UU      2970  0.0  0.0  19556  1228 pts/0    S+   02:48   0:00 tmux
UU      3445  0.0  0.0  12944   988 pts/5    S+   03:31   0:00 grep --color=auto tmux
UU     27557  0.0  0.2  29788  4840 ?        Ss   Jan04   0:02 tmux

How could I kill all of these at once (or at least some of them, selectivity) ?

7 Answers7

328

You can use tmux kill-server to cleanly and gracefully kill all tmux open sessions (and server).

If you are inside a tmux session you would like to keep, use tmux kill-session -a to close all other sessions.

To close a specific session, use tmux list-sessions to identify the session you want to kill, and then use tmux kill-session -t targetSession to kill that specific session.

Also you can grossly kill all tmux processes with pkill -f tmux.

Hope it helps.

dgonzalez
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    ps aux | grep tmux after tmux kill-server still shows a tmux process... Same goes with pkill -f tmux as in my answer. Can you explain this? Thanks, –  Jan 05 '17 at 06:20
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    @Benia are you sure you are not just seeing the grep tmux process (which is included in the ps output of your original question)? – steeldriver Jan 05 '17 at 13:45
  • Not sure I understand. –  Jan 05 '17 at 14:10
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    If you issue ps aux | grep blablablawhichdoesntexist it will always show at least one line, corresponding to the grep blablablawhichdoesntexist command. – dgonzalez Jan 05 '17 at 14:14
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    Are you missing -t flag, cos it shows error without -t flag set for killing a particular session. Usage: kill-session [-a] [-t target-session] – 1rq3fea324wre Nov 01 '17 at 03:03
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    It used to be very painful tmux ls | grep : | cut -d. -f1 | awk '{print substr($1, 0, length($1)-1)}' | xargs kill – Foad Feb 01 '18 at 14:35
  • How can one kill a range of sessions? For instance, suppose I want to end sessions 3 through 6 but leave 0 through 2 and 7 through 9 unaffected. – Rylan Schaeffer Mar 26 '22 at 01:55
  • What does "gracefully" mean? I'm just asking because I see that word being used frequently but never really know what that means. – Sean Sep 07 '22 at 00:31
  • @Sean It usually refers to something that shows grace and/or elegance. In this context gracefully means in the best and most appropriate way possible, using the most appropriate interface and avoiding crudely killing processes. – dgonzalez Sep 12 '22 at 11:42
  • what about by username? – Charlie Parker Nov 14 '22 at 20:13
30

I can kill all of these processes with the command:

pkill -f tmux

It kills all processes (full list) of the matching name (tmux).

Note for newcomers: This way could serve you to kill all process of other matching names.

27

This would list and kill all the sessions:

tmux list-sessions | awk 'BEGIN{FS=":"}{print $1}' | \
     ifne xargs -n 1 tmux kill-session -t
alper
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Sebastian Dahlgren
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7

Given:

# tmux ls
session-0a: 1 windows (created Sat Dec  5 02:31:35 2020) [117x30]
session-84: 1 windows (created Sat Dec  5 01:55:18 2020) [190x47] (attached)
session-b3: 1 windows (created Sat Dec  5 03:23:44 2020) [94x13]
session-b2: 1 windows (created Sat Dec  5 02:45:00 2020) [104x14]
session-ae: 1 windows (created Sat Dec  5 01:55:18 2020) [190x47] (attached)

This will kill all sessions not attached by someone:

tmux list-sessions | grep -v attached | awk 'BEGIN{FS=":"}{print $1}' | xargs -n 1 tmux kill-session -t || echo No sessions to kill

References:

  1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10411616/grep-regex-not-containing-string
  2. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/33049/how-to-check-if-a-pipe-is-empty-and-run-a-command-on-the-data-if-it-isnt
  3. How to kill all tmux sessions (or at least multiple sessions) from the CLI?
user
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2

Here another solution that allows you to select easily between useful sessions and the ones to delete, enter in tmux:

Check your sessions pressing:

ctrl+b+s

Then move with the arrows and press t to target as many sessions as you want to kill.

Press : and write

kill-session

I think this solution is the faster one as you don't need to write the name or number of the sessions to delete, but you rather use the UI of the own tmux to delete all selected at the same time.

In the same menu, you can also delete them one by one pressing x to delete and y to accept the deletion, so you write even less if you don't have many sessions to delete.

Pablo Ruiz
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1

I have written a small app in C which does this.

It's called kkill, you can simply

kkill tmux tmux-server tmux-something etc

this will kill all tmux processes running. it is a lot simpler than pkill.

https://github.com/giorgossaridakis/kkill

21 December 2021 - updated kkill.c, added a tsr kkiller.c who 'll watch for processes and send them SIGKILL as they become active

Giorgos Saridakis
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0

Kill all sessions with no one attached (based on this answer):

tmux ls | awk 'BEGIN{FS=":"}!/attached/{print $1}' | xargs -n 1 tmux kill-ses -t
Pablo Bianchi
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