How to kill a process with 'kill' combined with 'grep'

bash process grep kill ps
Edward picture Edward · Apr 21, 2016 · Viewed 13.9k times · Source

I'd like to kill a process/script with a simple command using. At the moment I do the following

ps -ef | grep myscriptname
kill 123456

But is there a way to maybe combine the 2 command together so I don't need to look and manually write the pid, something like this kill grep myscriptname?

Answer

John Zwinck picture John Zwinck · Apr 21, 2016

You want pkill:

pkill myscriptname

On some systems there is a similar tool called killall, but be careful because on Solaris it really does kill everything!

Note that there is also pgrep which you can use to replace your ps | grep pipeline:

pgrep myscriptname

It prints the PID for you, and nothing else.

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