Jompeich d’er Bisente

I’m almost ashamed to admit I didn’t knew of this command until very recently. :-)

Everybody knows the kill command, and almost everybody knows  killall too (like kill using the process’ name instead of its  PID). The problem with killall is that it only signals the processes matching the exact name you specify, and sometimes you want to work over a series of related processes that begin with the same word, or have a given word on their command line. pkill does just that:

pkill -9 -f foo

As a side note, what I used before when I wanted to do this was:

kill $SIGNAL $(ps aux | grep $PROG | awk '{print $2}')