How do I kill this tomcat process in Terminal?

Question

Using ps -ef | grep tomcat I found a tomcat server that is running. I tried kill -9 {id} but it returns \"No such process.\" What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

As others already noted, you have seen the grep process. If you want to restrict the output to tomcat itself, you have two alternatives

• wrap the first searched character in a character class

  ps -ef | grep '[t]omcat'
  

  This searches for tomcat too, but misses the grep [t]omcat entry, because it isn't matched by [t]omcat.

• use a custom output format with ps

  ps -e -o pid,comm | grep tomcat
  

  This shows only the pid and the name of the process without the process arguments. So, grep is listed as grep and not as grep tomcat.