See

1. Proc::ProcessTable
2. and the kill command in Perl

ps -lf | grep "user" |  perl -ane '($h,$m,$s) = split /:/,$F[13]; kill
+ 9, $F[3] if ($h > 1);'
[download]

You can change the criteria for killing the process, but in this case I pick any with a TIME greater than 1 hour.

Though, this will be dependent on the particulars of the 'ps' command on your flavor of unix, most notably whether it's a BSD or SySV flavor. BSD has the -u option to select only those processes for a user, but the other does not which is why I typically just use grep "username".

If your particular ps is different, you'll only have to change the indexes into @F. In the above case, the TIME is at index 13 in the format "00:00:00" and the PID of the process is index 3 and is just an integer.

Thanks so much. That's just what we need.
BTW do you know how can I put that one-liner in CRONTAB?

$ crontab -e
[download]


Regards,
Edward

You can put it in crontab directly (everything after the first five fields is considered the command),

* * * * * ps -lf | grep "user" |  perl -ane '($h,$m,$s) = split /:/,$F
+[13]; kill 9, $F[3] if ($h > 1);'
[download]

or, wrap it in a shell script and call the shell script from your crontab entry instead.

#!/bin/sh
# longprockill.sh
ps -lf | grep "user" |  perl -ane '($h,$m,$s) = split /:/,$F[13]; kill
+ 9, $F[3] if ($h > 1);'
[download]

And call it crontab like so,

* * * * * longprockill.sh
[download]

---
echo S 1 [ Y V U | perl -ane 'print reverse map { $_ = chr(ord($_)-1) } @F;'

Just to throw this (possibly) related tidbit out: If you're interested in / worried about how much CPU time (as opposed to wall clock time) the process is using you might look at setting RLIMIT_CPU (either by your systems per-user login defaults, or your shell's ulimit command, or from Perl with BSD::Resource). Setting that sends a signal to the process when it has over stayed its welcome and run too long (on CPU doing actual work time).