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I have lots of pdf opened(40-50). I want to close all pdfs at the same time, not one by one.

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What program did you use to open them? – Milan Todorovic Dec 4 '12 at 11:23
What desktop environment (Unity, GNOME, KDE)? – Eric Carvalho Dec 4 '12 at 12:01

2 Answers

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You could send a regular kill signal to all instances of the PDF reader application.

First, identify your application name. For GNOME default PDF reader is evince, for KDE this is okular. Now, kill all of those processes you own using pkill, like this:

pkill -u gert evince

To kill all evince processes owned by me (gert).

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You can use grep to find all the process and kill it using the below command

kill -9 `ps -ef | grep ".pdf" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`

Hope this helps.

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Why kill with signal 9? Standard signal 15 should be sufficient to close an application. Additionally, you don't need a complicated chain of commands when there's pkill. I suggest to take a look at my answer. – gertvdijk Dec 4 '12 at 11:48
@gertvdijk Yes. 15(SIGTERM) can be used. But here I have used 9(SIGKILL) to kill process and to ignore any File IO operation that can be handled at the kernel level. kill -9 for sure kill :) – devav2 Dec 4 '12 at 12:07
For a simple PDF reader it won't do much damage, but don't make this a habit. It can do serious harm (corruption) when you kill processes uncleanly, similar to cutting the power of your machine without a proper shutdown. – gertvdijk Dec 4 '12 at 12:10

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