How can I kill all my EC2 instances from the command line?

This is an old question but thought I'd share a solution for AWS CLI:

aws ec2 terminate-instances --instance-ids $(aws ec2 describe-instances --filters  "Name=instance-state-name,Values=pending,running,stopped,stopping" --query "Reservations[].Instances[].[InstanceId]" --output text | tr '\n' ' ')

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Related info:

If hackers have disabled accidental instance termination, first run this command:

aws ec2 describe-instances --filters  "Name=instance-state-name,Values=pending,running,stopped,stopping" --query "Reservations[].Instances[].[InstanceId]" --output text  |  xargs --delimiter '\n' --max-args=1 aws ec2   modify-instance-attribute  --no-disable-api-termination --instance-id

AWS Console and Elasticfox make it pretty easy.

A command-line solution can be achieved in one-line using the EC2 API tools:

for i in `ec2din | grep running | cut -f2`; do ec2kill $i; done

As far as I know there isn't an 'all' switch for the ec2-terminate-instances command. So you probably need to script it. It won't be that hard. You only need to generate a comma separated list of your instances.

This is a python script I am using:

import sys
import time
from boto.ec2.connection import EC2Connection

def main():
    conn = EC2Connection('', '')
    instances = conn.get_all_instances()
    print instances
    for reserv in instances:
        for inst in reserv.instances:
            if inst.state == u'running':
                print "Terminating instance %s" % inst
                inst.stop()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

It uses boto library. This is not necessary for the specific task (a simple shell script will be enough), but it may be handy in many occasions.

Finally are you aware of Elasticfox extension for Firefox? This is by far the easiest way to access EC2.