closing all of the terminal windows at once

[nickstephens]

Hi all,

I can not seem to be able to find what I am looking for and I am sure there must be a simple way of doing this that can be included as a shell command. Does anybody know how to shut all of the terminal windows open at the same time. It would be even more useful if this could be done for a particular desktop.

[prshah]

Does anybody know how to shut all of the terminal windows open at the same time.

All terminal windows (emulated terminals) run in a single "parent" process id. If you kill that parent process id, all terminal windows will close instantly.

Try it; open a number of terminals (Applications-Accessories-Terminal) and the give this command

sudo kill `ps -e | grep -i gnome-terminal | cut -f 1 -d " "`

[hictio]

What's wrong with using 'killall' for this?

Just tested for kicks, added as an alias on my ~/.bashrc:



alias kill_term='/usr/bin/killall gnome-terminal'


Then, issue:



source .bashrc (ENTER)


After that, the alias is "live", typed "kill_term" on a Gnome Terminal, and all of them went poof.
Of course, this does not take into account which terminal is in which Virtual Desktop, it simply kills everyone of them.

[prshah]

sudo kill `ps -e | grep -i gnome-terminal | cut -f 1 -d " "`





alias kill_term='/usr/bin/killall gnome-terminal'



Once again I have proved that the simplest solution is right beyond my grasp. You are quite right, killall will do the job just as well, and with a great deal less fuss.

[nickstephens]

typical! I was so close. I just didn't try without a space between kill and all. Ah well, done now. cheers for the help


What's wrong with using 'killall' for this?

Just tested for kicks, added as an alias on my ~/.bashrc:



alias kill_term='/usr/bin/killall gnome-terminal'


Then, issue:



source .bashrc (ENTER)


After that, the alias is "live", typed "kill_term" on a Gnome Terminal, and all of them went poof.
Of course, this does not take into account which terminal is in which Virtual Desktop, it simply kills everyone of them.

[spupy]

Ok, about killing all terms on a specific virtual desktop. You could use the program wmctrl. It is used to manage windows from the command line.
You can use this command:

wmctrl -lp | grep "Term" | grep " NumberOfVirtualDesktop "
(note the spaces around the number, they are essential)
To find all windows with "Term" in their title, that are present on a particular virtual desktop. Counting virtual desktops starts from 0. Then you can extend this command to:

wmctrl -lp | grep "Term" | grep " 2 " | awk '{print $3}'
This will print the process IDs of all windows with "Term" in their title, who reside on the 3rd virtual desktop. Now you can use kill.
This is the complete script:

#!/bin/bash
#Argument 1 is the number of the desktop, counting from 0
#If not present, kill terms on all desktops

title="Term"

if [ "$1" = "" ]
then
wmctrl -lp | grep "$title" | awk '{print $3}' | while read line
do
kill $line
done
exit
fi

wmctrl -lp | grep "$title" | grep " $1 " | awk '{print $3}' | while read line
do
kill $line
done