How to kill all process with given name?

I run command ps -A | grep <application_name> and getting list of process like this:

19440 ?        00:00:11 <application_name>
21630 ?        00:00:00 <application_name>
22694 ?        00:00:00 <application_name>

I want to kill all process from the list: 19440, 21630, 22694.

I have tried ps -A | grep <application_name> | xargs kill -9 $1 but it works with errors.

kill: illegal pid ?
kill: illegal pid 00:00:00
kill: illegal pid <application_name>

How can I do this gracefully?

Answers:

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Method 1

pkill -f 'PATTERN'

Will kill all the processes that the pattern PATTERN matches. With the -f option, the whole command line (i.e. including arguments) will be taken into account. Without the -f option, only the command name will be taken into account.

See also man pkill on your system.

Method 2

The problem is that ps -A | grep <application_name> | xargs -n1 returns output like this

19440
?
00:00:11
<application_name>
21630
?
00:00:00
<application_name>
22694
?
00:00:00
<application_name>

You can use awk to a get first a column of ps output.

ps -A | grep <application_name> | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -n1

Will return list of PIDs

19440
21630
22694

And adding kill -9 $1 you have a command which kills all PIDs

ps -A | grep <application_name> | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill -9 $1

Method 3

killall can do that.

$ killall application_name

Method 4

pkill sends SIGTERM in default, and in my case pkill -f <some_pattern> did’nt kill my processes. I recommend below command for such cases, which worked perfectly for me!

kill -9 $(pgrep -f somepattern)

I also recommend to see which processes match before running kill command

pgrep -af somepattern

Method 5

My approach is similiar to @Łukasz D. Tulikowski‘s. Instead of using grep <application_name>; I have used grep "[a]pplication_name", which does not match with its own process command line.

The square bracket expression is part of the grep‘s character class pattern matching. (Reference).

You can use awk to a get first a column of ps output.

ps -A | grep "[a]pplication_na" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -n1

Will return list of PIDs

7644
407
406

Later adding kill -9 $1 you have a command, which kills all PIDs

kill -9 $(ps aux | grep "[a]pplication_na" | awk '{print $2}')

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0