How can I kill a process by name instead of PID

Question

Sometimes when I try to start Firefox it says  a Firefox process is already running   So I have to do this   jeremy jeremy-desktop    ps aux   grep firefox jeremy    7451 25 0 27 4 170536 65680          Sl   22 39   1 18  usr lib firefox-3 0 1 firefox jeremy    7578  0 0  0 3   3004   768 pts 0    S    22 44   0 00 grep firefox jeremy jeremy-desktop    kill 7451   What I d like is a command that would do all that for me  It would take an input string and grep for it  or whatever  in the list of processes  and would kill all the processes in the output   jeremy jeremy-desktop    killbyname firefox   I tried doing it in PHP but exec  ps aux   seems to only show processes that have been executed with exec   in the PHP script itself  so the only process it shows is itself

User · Answer

awk oneliner  which parses the header of ps output  so you don t need to care about column numbers  but column names   Support regex  For example  to kill all processes  which executable name  without path  contains word  firefox  try  ps -fe   awk  NR  1 for  i 1  i lt  NF  i     if   i   COMMAND   Ncmd i  else if   i   PID   Npid i  if   Ncmd     Npid   print  wrong or no header   gt    dev stderr   exit    Ncmd    name    print  killing   Ncmd  with PID    Npid  system  kill   Npid    name   firefox

User · Answer

The default kill command accepts command names as an alternative to PID  See kill  1   An often occurring trouble is that bash provides its own kill which accepts job numbers  like kill  1  but not command names  This hinders the default command  If the former functionality is more useful to you than the latter  you can disable the bash version by calling  enable -n kill  For more info see kill and enable entries in bash  1

User · Answer

more correct would be    export pid  ps aux   grep process name   awk  NR  1 print  2     cut -d    -f1  kill -9  pid

User · Answer

A bit longer alternative   kill  pidof firefox

User · Answer

I normally use the killall command   Check this link for details of this command

User · Answer

You can kill processes by name with killall  lt name gt      killall sends a signal to all   processes running any of the specified   commands  If no signal name is   specified  SIGTERM is sent       Signals can be specified either by   name  e g  -HUP or -SIGHUP   or by number  e g    -1  or by option -s       If the command name is not regular   expression  option -r  and contains a   slash      processes executing that   particular file will be selected for   killing  independent of their name    But if you don t see the process with ps aux  you probably won t have the right to kill it

User · Answer

Kill all processes having snippet in startup path  You can kill all apps started from some directory by for putting  directory  as a snippet  This is quite usefull when you start several components for the same application from the same app directory   ps ax   grep  lt snippet gt    grep -v grep   awk   print  1     xargs kill     I would preffer pgrep if available

User · Answer

To kill with grep   kill -9  pgrep myprocess

User · Answer

Strange  but I haven t seen the solution like this   kill -9  pidof firefox    it can also kill multiple processes  multiple pids  like   kill -9  pgrep firefox    I prefer pidof since it has single line output    gt  pgrep firefox 6316 6565  gt  pidof firefox 6565 6316

User · Answer

The easiest way to do is first check you are getting right process IDs with   pgrep -f  part of a command    If the result is as expected  Go with   pkill -f  part of a command

User · Answer

kill -9   ps aux   grep -e myprocessname  awk    print  2

User · Answer

Also possible to use    pkill -f  Process name    For me  it worked up perfectly  It was what I have been looking for  pkill doesn t work with name without the flag   When -f is set  the full command line is used for pattern matching

User · Answer

I was asking myself the same question but the problem with the current answers is that they don t safe check the processes to be killed so    it could lead to terrible mistakes       especially if several processes matches the pattern   As a disclaimer  I m not a sh pro and there is certainly room for improvement   So I wrote a little sh script       bin sh  killables   ps aux   grep  1   grep -v mykill   grep -v grep  if        killables          then   echo  You are going to kill some process     echo    killables   else   echo  No process with the pattern  1 found     return fi echo -n  Is it ok  Y N   read input if     input     Y    then   for pid in   echo    killables     awk   print  2      do     echo killing  pid           kill  pid      echo  pid killed   done fi

User · Answer

Using  killall command    killall -9  lt processname gt

User · Answer

If you run GNOME  you can use the system monitor  System- Administration- System Monitor  to kill processes as you would under Windows  KDE will have something similar

User · Answer

pkill firefox   More information  http   linux about com library cmd blcmdl1 pkill htm

User · Answer

On Mac I could not find the pgrep and pkill neither was killall working so wrote a simple one liner script -  export pid  ps   grep process name   awk  NR  1 print  1     cut -d    -f1  kill  pid   If there s an easier way of doing this then please share

User · Answer

ps aux   grep processname   cut -d    -f7   xargs kill -9

[linux] How can I kill a process by name instead of PID?

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