skill

Send a signal to processes that match selection criterias.

skill [signal to send] [options] process selection criteria

-t The next string is a terminal (tty or pty)
-u The next string is a username
-p The next string is a process ID
-c The next string is a command name

skill -9 -u khai -c httpd

Kill users on new-style PTY devices:

skill -KILL -v /dev/pts/*

To free a process without killing it:

skill -STOP PID

To revive the process:

skill -CONT PID

This approach is immensely useful for temporarily freezing processes to make room for more important processes to complete.

The command is very versatile. If you want to stop all processes of the user "oracle", only one command does it all:

skill -STOP oracle

all the processes of user "oracle" stop, including the session you may be on. To be completely unambiguous you can optionally give a new parameter to specify the type of the parameter. To stop a command called oracle, you can give:

skill -STOP -c oracle

Stop 3 users:

skill -STOP viro lm davem