Kill a Process by Process Name from Ubuntu Command Line
There are a number of ways to kill a process if you know the name of the process. Here's a couple different ways you can accomplish this. We are going to assume that the process we are trying to kill is named irssi
kill $(pgrep irssi)
killall -v irssi
pkill irssi
kill `ps -ef | grep irssi | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
These techniques can be useful in shell scripts, where you wouldn't know the process ID and would need to restart or kill a process.
The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. When he's not coming up with great how-to articles, he's probably writing at his personal blog. This article was written on 09/25/06 and tagged with: Ubuntu, SysAdmin, Shell Scripts
ps -ef | grep irssi | grep -v grep | xargs kill
would work too
I just use this: killall (program name). Works fine for me.