How to kill all processes matching a name?

shell command-line kill
PuercoPop picture PuercoPop · Jun 17, 2011 · Viewed 257k times · Source

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.

ps aux | grep -ie amarok | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}'
Output:
kill -9 3052
kill -9 3071
kill -9 3076
kill -9 3077
kill -9 3079
kill -9 3080
kill -9 3082
kill -9 3083
kill -9 3084
kill -9 3085
kill -9 3086
kill -9 3087
kill -9 3088
kill -9 3089
kill -9 4031

Answer

Tim Bielawa picture Tim Bielawa · Jun 17, 2011

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

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