TIL 14 June 2022

Delete all evicted pods in one line

Evicted pods pile up and make kubectl get pods messy. They are done, but they just stay there. Here is a one-liner to clean them up across all namespaces:

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -o json \
  | jq '.items[] | select(.status.reason=="Evicted") | "kubectl delete pod \(.metadata.name) -n \(.metadata.namespace)"' \
  | xargs -n 1 bash -c

It gets every pod as JSON, keeps only the ones with reason Evicted, builds a delete command for each one, and runs them one by one with xargs. The \(...) parts are jq string interpolation.

It is good to do a dry run first: remove the xargs part and just look at the commands it would run.