How to stop Grunt

• If it's a task that you currently running you can stop it with ctrl + c

• If it's a task that is running in background you can find his process id (pid) with ps aux | grep grunt and then kill it with kill {pid}

One liner to kill the currently running grunt task:

kill -9 $(ps aux | grep -v "grep" | grep grunt | awk '{print $2}')

Explanation:

Kill is the command to end a process

The -9 option is used to ensure the process is actually killed if it's stuck in a loop

ps -aux lists the currently running processes

grep -v "grep" excludes any lines with the word grep so we don't kill the current grep command that we are running

grep grunt just returns the line with grunt

And finally awk '{print $2}' returns the number in the second column that is the pid. This is what is passed to kill.

In Powershell, run the Get-Process cmdlet, to list all processes, or with a comma-separated list to filter (wildcards work too). Its alias is ps. For example:

Get-Process grunt, node

or

ps grunt, node

Once you determine the process ID (third column from the right, 'Id'), then you can use Stop-Process to end it. Its alias is kill. For example:

Stop-Process 2570

or

kill 2570

I'm posting this because the question and a commenter asks for a Windows, and grep doesn't work on my Windows 10 install, and its Powershell equivalent, Select-String, doesn't satisfactorily return the full process information. Luckily Get-Process has its own filtering!

A shorter solution with a nifty trick like Felix Eve's:

kill -9 $(ps -aux | grep "[g]runt" | awk '{print $2}')

The [] avoids having the word 'grunt' in the grep, so it won't get accidentally deleted.