A Simple Ruby Script to Gracefully Terminate System Processes

To gracefully terminate a system processes you issue the kill -15 command. You then usually monitor the process to ensure that it terminates. If it does not, you issue the kill -9 command to ensure that it does. Since this is a pretty common task, I’ve created a simple Ruby script to automate it.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require "timeout"

ARGV.each do |k|
    begin
        Process.kill("TERM", k.to_i)
        Timeout::timeout(30) do
            begin
              sleep 1
            end while !!(`ps -p #{k}`.match k)
        end
    rescue Timeout::Error
        Process.kill("KILL", k.to_i)
    end
end

This script will issue the kill -15 command, monitor the process for up to 30 seconds to make sure it terminates, and if it still exists, issue the kill -9 command.

gracefully-kill 1234

You can also call this script for multiple process ids:

gracefully-kill 1234 5678 91011