The Reluctant Sysadmin

This morning I had a compile that was hanging and/or calling itself. This made the server, and more importantly, the “yes people use it” webserver unresponsive. This was not fun.

Here are the tools I used to kill the processes:


ps -aux | grep -i make | awk '{print $2}'

ps -aux | grep -i make | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

ps -aux | grep -i make | awk '{print "kill -9 "$2}' |sh -x

killall make


The final 2 commands I think did the best job.

I seem to be learning more server administration. I still don’t like it, but I can do more of it if I need to. Maybe installing Xubuntu on my machine at home really has been useful as I spend more time on the command line.