How to kill background task from another session? [closed]

Question

I've run a multithreading program in background:

./my_task &

Then I logged out, then logged again. Now jobs command does not show this program, but top does show the threads of this program. So it is still running. How to stop it? I guess I can kill each thread, but there are many of them and I don't know how it will affect my_task program.

I am using Debian Squeeze.

Answer 1

In common case, you can use

ps aux | grep my_task

-or, if you know, that process name starts with "my_task" exactly:

ps aux | grep [m]y_task

(this will exclude grep process itself from result table)

to get desired process id (let it be $pid) and then kill it with kill $pid

edit (thanks to comments below): jobs is part of bash itself, and so information about it is listed in man bash page:

Job control refers to the ability to selectively stop (suspend) the execution of processes and continue (resume) their execution at a later point. A user typically employs this facility via an interactive interface supplied jointly by the operating system kernel's terminal driver and bash.

   The  shell  associates a job with each pipeline.  It keeps a table of currently executing jobs, which may
   be listed with the jobs command.  When bash starts a job asynchronously (in the background), it prints  a
   line that looks like:

          [1] 25647

   indicating  that  this  job  is  job number 1 and that the process ID of the last process in the pipeline
   associated with this job is 25647.  All of the processes in a single pipeline are  members  of  the  same
   job.  Bash uses the job abstraction as the basis for job control.

but this will not help a case since it will list jobs only for current instance (which, of cause, will change when you're changing your session)