Killing java processes

I often want to kill java processes, be it an unresponsive Eclipse, a blown-out jEdit after I try to open a 2GB file, a stalled JUnit test suite, a borked scalac compiler daemon or a random Tomcat instance.

It gets tiring to write,

$ jps -lv
48231 /opt/eclipse-3.5.1/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.201.jar -Xmx1024m
10258 /opt/boisvert/jedit-4.3.2/jedit.jar -Xmx192M
5295 sun.tools.jps.Jps -Dapplication.home=/opt/boisvert/jdk1.6.0_21 -Xms8m

followed by,

$ kill 48231

You know, with the cut & paste in-between ... so I have this Ruby shell script called killjava, a close cousin of killall:

$ killjava -h
killjava [-9] [-n] [java_main_class]

-9, --KILL                       Send KILL signal instead of TERM
-n, --no-prompt                  Do not prompt user, kill all matching processes
-h, --help                       Show this message

that does the job. It's not like I use it everyday but everytime I use it, I'm glad it's there.

Download the script from Github (requires Ruby and UNIX-based OS).