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I have a process called "P1", right now the way I kill the process is:
$ ps aux | grep "P1"
" Now it returns two processes related to "P1": one is the actual P1 process I want to kill, the other one is the "grep P1" which I don't care.
$ kill -9 <P1 pid>
However, I wish to combine the two processes into one. Currently I couldn't find an efficient way to do that mainly because I have to look for the from the output of the first command. Any good method?
You can use pgrep with the -x flag:
kill -9 $(pgrep -x P1)
or better, with pkill you can do this:
pkill -9 -x P1
with BSD pkill:
pkill 9 -x P1
-9, at least my version doesn't have that option.
Feb 8, 2016 at 23:29
pkill program that doesn't support a signal number option.
Feb 8, 2016 at 23:55
You can use killall(1) (at least here on Fedora Linux). It has a raft of options.
Personally, I use it almost exclusively when I know that there is just one process with the given name.
pkill which is quite consistent, killall has dramatically different implementations depending on the OS used, especially System V based ones like Solaris where it will do what its name says, kill all running processes (regardless of their names.)
pkill -x P1is the right way.