Killing multiple process by process name using shell script

Question

I am having a shell script, which will start processes and kills the process. It is accepting the processes names as arguments. Need to find the pid and kill those.

Initially, it was like

for procname in ${@};do
    pkill -f $procname
done

Idk why, it is not killing all the processes passed to it. Now, I'm looking something like this

for procname in ${@};do
  IFS=$"\n"; echo
    (ps auxw | awk -v proc="$procname" -v preserve="${0##*/}" \
       '$0 ~ proc && $0 !~ preserve && ! /awk/ { print $2}')
done

I'm trying to print the pid in above code, but I need kill command and it should be good, if it works without for loop

process names will contains . like com.abc.def.pqr.xyz

Answer 1

pkill -f -- "$regex" kills processes whose arg list (for those processes that executed a command, or have an ancestor that did) joined with spaces (same as reported by standard ps -f or BSD ps u) matches the given extended regular expression (always excluding itself).

So all you need here is to join the positional parameters with |:

IFS='|'
pkill -f -- "$*"

To match on process names instead of arg list, remove the -f. Note however that on Linux, the length of process names is limited to 15 bytes, so can't possibly be com.abc.def.pqr.xyz. Also note that . is a regular expression operator that matches any single character, so to match process arg lists that contain that (and not comXabcYdefZpqr+xyz as well for instance), you'd need a com\.abc\.def\.pqr\.xyz regular expression.

Answer 2

I appreciate @Stéphane Chazelas answer. Since I am getting arguments for this shell script from JAVA and they are space separated and they contain character . in process names. I figured it out like this..

temp=()
for procname in ${@}; do
    temp+=$(jps -ml | grep $procname | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1 " "}')
done
kill -9 $temp