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.)

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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 <snippet> | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill

* I would preffer pgrep if available

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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<=NF; i++) {if ($i=="COMMAND") Ncmd=i; else if ($i=="PID") Npid=i} if (!Ncmd || !Npid) {print "wrong or no header" > "/dev/stderr"; exit} }$Ncmd~"/"name"$"{print "killing "$Ncmd" with PID " $Npid; system("kill "$Npid)}' name=.*firefox.*

Answer 5

I normally use the killall command.

Check this link for details of this command.

Answer 6

Using #killall command:

#killall -9 <processname>