Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

The kill family of commands

The kill command takes the process ID as the argument. The killall command terminates the process by name:

    $ killall process_name

The -s option specifies the signal to send. By default, killall sends a SIGTERM signal:

    $ killall -s SIGNAL process_name

The -9 option forcibly kills a process by name:

    $ killall -9 process_name

Here's an example of the preceding:

    $ killall -9 gedit

The -u owner specifies the process's user:

    $ killall -u USERNAME process_name

The -I option makes killall run in interactive mode:

The pkill command is similar to the kill command, but by default it accepts a process name instead of a process ID:

    $ pkill process_name
    $ pkill -s SIGNAL process_name

SIGNAL is the signal number. ...