Ygtjki

Suppose I have started my process like:

java -DSOME_STRING -jar foo.jar

Then on linux, I can use the following to find or kill this process:

pgrep -f SOME_STRING
pkill -f SOME_STRING

However this doesn't seem to work on cygwin. Can anyone suggest an alternative for these tools in cygwin?

pkill and pgrep certainly exist within Cygwin, in the procps package (you can search cygwin packages here).

It appears to work for me,

tony:~$ nohup sleep 100983 &
[1] 5476
tony:~$ nohup: ignoring input and appending output to `nohup.out'
tony:~$
tony:~$ ps -ef | grep sleep
 tony 5476 2696 2 23:28:53 /usr/bin/sleep
tony:~$ pkill -f sleep
[1]+ Terminated nohup sleep 100983
tony:~$

and

tony:~$ nohup sleep 837746 &
[1] 228
tony:~$ nohup: ignoring input and appending output to `nohup.out'
tony:~$ pgrep -f 837746
228
tony:~$ pkill -f 837746
[1]+ Terminated nohup sleep 837746
tony:~$

Update: okay, tested with java. Executing java from the Cygwin command line does not result in the java string being placed into /proc/<pid>/cmdline, that just contains -bash.
This appears to be a limitation of Cygwin.

tony:~$ java -Dsomething=valid -jar Captor.jar &
[1] 2700
tony:~$ ps -ef
 UID PID PPID TTY STIME COMMAND
 tony 4164 1 ? Aug 21 /usr/bin/mintty
 tony 4676 4164 0 Aug 21 /usr/bin/bash
 tony 5776 4676 0 Aug 23 /usr/bin/ssh
 tony 5148 1 ? 23:53:03 /usr/bin/mintty
 tony 5332 5148 1 23:53:03 /usr/bin/bash
 tony 5816 1 ? 00:04:16 /usr/bin/mintty
 tony 5432 5816 2 00:04:16 /usr/bin/bash
 tony 2700 5432 2 00:04:34 /cygdrive/c/Windows/system32/java
 tony 2232 5432 2 00:04:39 /usr/bin/ps
tony:~$ pgrep -f something
tony:~$ cat /proc/2700/cmdline
-bash
tony:~$
tony:~$ cat /proc/2700/exename
/cygdrive/c/Windows/system32/java

I suspect therefore, the answer is you can't do this with a Cygwin tool, you would need a Windows specific tool.

The Cygwin utilities work like the Linux ones, but they only work on Cygwin processes. For Windows processes, you need to use Windows utilities, such as the ones from Sysinternals. PsKill can kill processes by name.

In older Cygwin versions, there is a procps package that you can install to get the same functionality with the same commands.

In newer Cygwin versions, the procps package no longer exists and is replaced by package procps-ng.