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We've a scenario where I'm executing various remote commands at once like the following:

ssh user@remote-ip "
    ps -A | grep java
    rm -rf /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/ROOT
    ls
"

The above set of commands runs properly on the remote server. But when I'm adding a pkill command in between then the commands after it does not executes:

ssh user@remote-ip "
    ps -A | grep java
    pkill -f tomcat
    rm -rf /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/ROOT
    ls
"

So, in the above case, the first two commands i.e. ps -A | grep java and pkill -f tomcat executes properly on the remote server and the rest of the two commands didn't.

Is there any special handling with pkill command?

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The script is stopping execution because the pkill call is failing. I suspect in this case tomcat has already been killed or you have the incorrect process name.

Pkill returns values as follows, from man page:

   0      One or more processes matched the criteria.
   1      No processes matched.
   2      Syntax error in the command line.
   3      Fatal error: out of memory etc.

To force the pkill line to always succeed even if it didn't kill anything add || true to the pkill line as follows:

ssh user@remote-ip "
    ps -A | grep java
    pkill -f tomcat || true
    rm -rf /usr/share/tomcat/webapps/ROOT
    ls
"

Note this trick will work in lots of other contexts however beware, you are suppressing an error message and with the script above you cannot tell whether or not pkill killed tomcat, only that tomcat is not running.

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    Thank you @Michael for the quick response, I just figured it out the reason. Commented Jul 9, 2015 at 13:28

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