[ILUG] kill process by name

[Colm MacCárthaigh]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 11:56:38AM +0100, Kenn Humborg wrote:
> > > 
> > > 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.


how on earth can this thread still be going. If your distro has pgrep , 
use it. Debian does , I don't know about the rest. 

colmmacc at dirac:~$ man -k pgrep
pgrep (1)            - look up or signal processes based on name and other attributes
colmmacc at dirac:~$ man -k pkill
pkill (1)            - look up or signal processes based on name and other attributes


There's a reason they exist :)

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