[ILUG] kill process by name

[Kenn Humborg]

> hrishy wrote:
> > Hi All
> > 
> > I want to kill a process by name...for example if
> > there are 100 process .what i want to do is
> 
> ps -ao pid,args | grep 'command' | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill

I've seen this kind of thing a lot, and it's always
bugged me...

There is nothing to prevent the grep command itself being killed
before it finishes.  When I'm doing this by hand, I always
do:

   ps ax | grep something | grep -v grep | ...

but in a script you need to be much more careful.  Some of the
processes you want to kill just might have 'grep' in their
command name or arg list.

Later,
Kenn