Identifying and killing background Python processes

How to kill rogue background Python processes

I started a simple Python http server as a background process at the end of a Python script. That was a mistake. Since it isn’t running in an open Terminal window, it is easy to forget about and it will run until you kill the process or reboot your machine. I don’t like that.

Here is how to identify and kill background Python processes in Terminal.app:

Run:

ps -elf | grep python

This will return something like this:

501 74440 74439 4004 0 31 0 2505592 9276 - S 0 ?? 0:00.29 python -m Simple 8:43AM 501 77045 77016 4006 0 31 0 2436888 812 - S+ 0 ttys000 0:00.00 grep python 8:57AM

The second column is the PID. Make note of which one you want to kill. Then run:

kill -9 PID

Example. Let’s say I want to kill the python -m SimpleHTTPServer process. I see that its PID is 74440. So I would run:

kill -9 74440