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

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