How to kill a job started by cron

[Swanky]

I am writing a background process in DB/C which is new to me. I can't find anything in the language that will give me it's PID like in C. I need to start and stop this process with cron. I am having trouble finding a way to do this.

I thought maybe I could set up another cron file and run it out of there rather than root and I might get a user ID and then do a "ps -u "myuser" -o PID >> PID" and I'd get the PIDs and kill them. No luck. The user is still "?" as in any cron job.

I thought I had a work around by deleteing the processes work files in cron and that would cause an error which would terminate the program. But I realized it would kill the program at some random time in the morning when the first activity caused the error and I would have no way to know when to restart it.

Can someone suggest a way to do this? Is there a way to use "ps" to get the PID I am missing? Is there a way to store the data from "ps -ef | grep "myprogram" so that I can draw the PIDs out of it? (My program runs as parent and child.) Is there a way to force a user name onto the cron job for easy identification?

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[normap]

I have a book here that describes how to get your PID using awk. If you have used awk you will probably know the commands to find your process that is running. There is also a way in awk to stop the process. I have never used awk myself but it really doesn't look that difficult.

I hope this helps. :

 

[GOSCO]

I thinks this is what you want!

ps -eaf | grep myprog | awk '{printf"kill -9 %s\n",$2}' > /tmp/killprog

where myprog is the name of the program you want to stop:

You just need to run killprog...

 

[Swanky]

Hey, great, that works. I just did "chmod +x killprog" and now I set up a script to run that command daily and it's done. Thanks a lot!

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