kill all Google Chrome tabs from the shell

If there are a lot of tabs open in Google Chrome, it tends to become slow. Killing tabs by hand, via the Task Manager helps, but is tedious. The following bash script (by

) lets you conveniently kill all open tabs from the shell (OS X only):

    #!/bin/bash

    ps ux | \
    grep '[C]hrome Helper --type=renderer' | \
    grep -v extension-process | \
    tr -s ' ' | \
    cut -d ' ' -f2 | \
    xargs kill

    # [C] explained: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/402/exclude-grep-from-your-grepped-output-of-ps-alias-included-in-description

That is, all tabs are still open, but they don’t display any content. You can reload any tab to get the content back.

I’d love Chrome to have a mode where all background tabs are stopped completely and only the frontmost tab is active. Kind of like processes are managed on iOS.