How Do I Kill YouTube-DL in a Shell Script?

Questions & Suggestions
1

I am using shell script to run youtube-dl to download multiple videos in the same time, and it runs perfectly. But sometimes the download speed is too slow, I want to kill the process and restart it(It always runs faster the second time, and Without killing the process, the downloaded video would always be corrupted). The thing is, i couldn't find a way to kill it.

I tired to insert osascript in Shell Script to get its process ID:

osascript -e 'tell application "Keyboard Maestro Engine" to setvariable "PID" to "'$$'"'

But it seems youtube-dl called some python program with its own process ID, so using the PID of the shell script doesn't really work.

So my questions is:

Is it possible to get the real process ID of youtube-dl and return it?

if not, does killing the macro(it runs asynchronously) work?

Or is there any other way to kill the process?

Thank you very much!

2

If you press ctrl+c in the terminal (not cmd+c), the current download will cancel.

3

Hey Pang,

You're running from an Execute a Shell Script action in a Keyboard Maestro macro – yes?

You cannot access the script-runner process once it's going.

You have to cancel the macro using Keyboard Maestro's Status Menu, or kill the macro using another macro.

Here're some hints:

Determining which macro is going rogue and debugging it - #5 by ccstone

-Chris

1 Like
4

Yes. This command will return the PID of youtube-dl

	/usr/bin/pgrep -f youtube-dl

But what you really want is pkill (see below).

If the script is running asynchronously, then quitting the macro would not kill the script.

Yes. This:

	/usr/bin/pkill -f youtube-dl

will kill youtube-dl.

Note that you need -f for pgrep and pkill in order to find the process name. Otherwise it will not find youtube-dl.

Please feel free to ask questions if you have them.

1 Like
5

Yeah! That did the trick! Following this I used prep -f youtube-dl to find the latest PID that just started, then used kill -9 to kill it then restart the download. It worked perfectly!

Thank you very much, this really made day!

6

You don't need to do that because

pkill -f youtube-dl

will find the PID of youtube-dl just like pgrep will and kill it. That's exactly why pkill was created. And it's been in macOS since … Lion? I think? A long time.

You also don't need kill -9 just a regular pkill should work just fine.

1 Like
7

i have multiple youtube-dl running in the same time, so kind of have to find the specific one to kill

8

in that case you're going to have to go to Terminal.app and either do something like:

      pgrep -ifl youtube-dl

which should show you all of the youtube-dl that are running, including the PID. Then you can just kill the one you want. I would not recommend trying to automate that. Chances of accidentally kill-ing the wrong process is too high.