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
         


        

Answer 1

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 2

A bit longer alternative:

kill `pidof firefox`

Answer 3

more correct would be:

export pid=`ps aux | grep process_name | awk 'NR==1{print $2}' | cut -d' ' -f1`;kill -9 $pid

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

To kill with grep:

kill -9 `pgrep myprocess`

Answer 6

kill -9 $(ps aux | grep -e myprocessname| awk '{ print $2 }')