How to kill all processes matching a name?

Question

Say I want to kill every process containing the word amarok. I can print out the commands I want to execute. But how do I actually make the shell execute them. ie.

Answer 1

pkill -x matches the process name exactly.

pkill -x amarok

pkill -f is similar but allows a regular expression pattern.

Note that pkill with no other parameters (e.g. -x, -f) will allow partial matches on process names. So "pkill amarok" would kill amarok, amarokBanana, bananaamarok, etc.

I wish -x was the default behavior!

Answer 2

If you're using cygwin or some minimal shell that lacks killall you can just use this script:

killall.sh - Kill by process name.

#/bin/bash
ps -W | grep "$1" | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill --

Usage:

$ killall <process name>

Answer 3

From man 1 pkill

-f     The pattern is normally only matched against the process name.
       When -f is set, the full command line is used.

Which means, for example, if we see these lines in ps aux:

apache   24268  0.0  2.6 388152 27116 ?        S    Jun13   0:10 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   24272  0.0  2.6 387944 27104 ?        S    Jun13   0:09 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   24319  0.0  2.6 387884 27316 ?        S    Jun15   0:04 /usr/sbin/httpd

We can kill them all using the pkill -f option:

pkill -f httpd

Answer 4

The safe way to do this is:

pkill -f amarok

Answer 5

Maybe adding the commands to executable file, setting +x permission and then executing?

ps aux | grep -ie amarok | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}' > pk;chmod +x pk;./pk;rm pk

Answer 6

use pgrep

kill -9 $(pgrep amarok)