Can I chain pgrep with kill?

Question

I have noticed that | is used to send results of first command to the another. I would like to kill all processes that match a name.
This is what pgrep normally does:

$ pgrep name
5089
5105

And multiple arguments seem to work with kill:

sudo kill 5089 5105

But this is wrong:

pgrep name | kill

So how to do it properly?

Answer 1

Try this:

pgrep name | xargs kill

If you use pgrep name | kill, the ouput of pgrep name is feed to stdin of kill. Because kill does not read arguments from stdin, so this will not work.

Using xargs, it will build arguments for kill from stdin. Example:

$ pgrep bash | xargs echo
5514 22298 23079

Answer 2

This should work:

pkill name

I also suggest reading the man page.

Answer 3

To answer the general rather than the specific...

Pipes are for passing output from one program as input to another program.

It looks like you're trying to use one program's output as command line arguments to another program, which is different.

To do that, use command substitution.

For example if you want to run

sudo kill 5089 5105

And you have a command pgrep name that outputs 5089 5105

You put them together like

sudo kill $(pgrep name)