Kill python interpeter in linux from the terminal

pkill -9 python

should kill any running python process.

There's a rather crude way of doing this, but be careful because first, this relies on python interpreter process identifying themselves as python, and second, it has the concomitant effect of also killing any other processes identified by that name.

In short, you can kill all python interpreters by typing this into your shell (make sure you read the caveats above!):

ps aux | grep python | grep -v "grep python" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

To break this down, this is how it works. The first bit, ps aux | grep python | grep -v "grep python", gets the list of all processes calling themselves python, with the grep -v making sure that the grep command you just ran isn't also included in the output. Next, we use awk to get the second column of the output, which has the process ID's. Finally, these processes are all (rather unceremoniously) killed by supplying each of them with kill -9.

pkill with script path

pkill -9 -f path/to/my_script.py

is a short and selective method that is more likely to only kill the interpreter running a given script.

See also: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/31107/linux-kill-process-based-on-arguments