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

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 2

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:

> pgrep firefox
6316
6565
> pidof firefox
6565 6316

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

I normally use the killall command.

Check this link for details of this command.

Answer 5

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).

Answer 6

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.