Well this can come handy , when you don't feel like playing with pid rather if you know the process name say "firefox",it would kill it.The script given below would kill the process with its name given as first parameter , though not robust enough to notify that process doesn't exist , well if you know what you are doing that's wouldn't be a problem.:) ---- killhim.sh ---- #!/bin/bash ps -u $USER |grep $1 | awk '{ print $1}'| xargs kill ----

Grep for a named process. Show Sample Output

This command kills all wine instances and each EXE application working on a PC. Here is command info: 1) ps ax > processes = save process list to file named "processes" (we save it because we don't wont egrep to be found in the future) 2) cat processes | egrep "*.exe |*exe]" = shows the file "processes" and after greps for each *.exe and *exe] in it 3) | awk '{ print $1 }' > pstokill = saves processes PID's to file "pstokill" using awk filter 4) kill $(cat pstokill) = kills each PID in file pstokill, which is shown by cat program 5) rm processes && rm pstokill = removes temporary files Show Sample Output

# define user pid to kill PID=httpd ; # kill all pids ps aux | grep $PID | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9 Show Sample Output

Did some research and found the previous command wrong, we don't kill a zombie but its parent. Just made some modifcation to khashmeshab's command.

This finds a process id by name, but without the extra grep that you usually see. Remember, awk can grep too!

alias ps?='psg' for maximum hawtness. Works in bash or zsh. Show Sample Output

Removed unneeded grep -v by making the initial grep unable to match itself.

This is a nice way to kill processes.. the example here is for firefox!!! substitute firefox for whatever the process name is... Show Sample Output

This command kills all processes with 'SomeCommand' in the process name. There are other more elegant ways to extract the process names from ps but they are hard to remember and not portable across platforms. Use this command with caution as you could accidentally kill other matching processes! xargs is particularly handy in this case because it makes it easy to feed the process IDs to kill and it also ensures that you don't try to feed too many PIDs to kill at once and overflow the command-line buffer. Note that if you are attempting to kill many thousands of runaway processes at once you should use 'kill -9'. Otherwise the system will try to bring each process into memory before killing it and you could run out of memory. Typically when you want to kill many processes at once it is because you are already in a low memory situation so if you don't 'kill -9' you will make things worse

Show Sample Output

list all the processes Show Sample Output