Kill all background jobs

To just kill all background jobs managed by bash, do

kill $(jobs -p)

Note that since both jobs and kill are built into bash, you shouldn't run into any errors of the Argument list too long type.

Use xargs instead of the $(jobs -p) subcommand, because if jobs -p is empty then the kill command will fail.

jobs -p | xargs kill

I guess depending on what output jobs -p gives, the solution could be slightly different. In my case

$ jobs -p
[1]  - 96029 running    some job
[2]  + 96111 running    some other job

Therefore, doing the following is no good.

$ jobs -p | xargs kill
kill: illegal process id: [1]

On the other hand, running kill $(jobs -p) does work but entails a lot of error messages, since the non-PID strings get passed to kill as well.

Therefore, my solution is to grep the PID first and then use xargs, as follows:

$ jobs -p | grep -o -E '\s\d+\s' | xargs kill