Conditionally killing a process using awk

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Hi folks,

I'm trying to combine a couple of awk commands and I'm having no luck. The idea is to kill a process if there has been less that a certain amount of download traffic within a certain period of time.

Any help would be appreciated.

What I have tried:

I can get the following to properly find the PID of a running qbittorrent process:

echo $( ps aux | grep "[q]bittorrent" | awk '{ print $2 }' )

And the following will tell me if there has been low download activity over the last few seconds:

collectl -c1 -i5 -sn | awk 'NF==4 && $2<200  { print $1 }'

The output is the amount of KB downloaded in last 5 seconds.

Now I want to combine these - replacing the print $1 in the second command with "kill" followed by the output of the first command.

I've tried several variations, such as

sudo $( collectl -c1 -i5 -sn | awk 'NF==4 && $2<20 { print "kill " $( ps aux | grep "[q]bittorrent" | awk '{ print $2 }' ) }' )

but to no avail.

Posted 23-Nov-17 17:18pm

C Pottinger

Updated 23-Nov-17 21:40pm

Jörgen Andersson

v3

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Jochen Arndt · Accepted Answer · 2017-11-23T21:40:00

Solution 1

You should put the commands into a shell script. Then you can use variables, conditions and much more.

Untested example without checking for empty variables:

Bash

#!/bin/bash

MIN_ACT=10
ACTIVITY=$( collectl -c1 -i5 -sn | awk 'NF==4 && $2<200 { print $1 }' )
if [ $ACTIVITY -lt $MIN_ACT ]; then
    TORR_PID=$( ps aux | grep "[q]bittorrent" | awk '{ print $2 }' )
    kill -s SIGTERM $TORR_PID
fi

Posted 23-Nov-17 21:40pm

Jochen Arndt

Comments

C Pottinger 24-Nov-17 9:17am

Thank you. That taught me enough to come up with this script:

#!/bin/bash

MIN_ACT=200

echo Looking for running qBitorrent. Please wait...
TORR_PID=$( ps aux | grep '[q]bittorrent' | awk '{ print $2 }' )
if [ -z "$TORR_PID" ]; then
    echo qBittorrent not found.
else
    echo Collecting traffic infomation. Please wait...
    ACTIVITY=$( collectl -c1 -i5 -sn | awk 'NF==4 { print $1 }' )
    if [ $ACTIVITY -lt $MIN_ACT ]; then
        echo Traffic is low. Killing qBittorrent PID:$TORR_PID. Please wait...
        kill -s SIGTERM $TORR_PID
    fi
fi
echo killqb done.