pgrep and pkill alternatives on mac os x?

Are there alternatives to pgrep and pkill commands on Mac OS X or should I just create aliases for them using other commands available for me?

Answers:

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Method 1

On OS X Lion with Homebrew:

$ brew install proctools

This downloads, builds and installs pgrep, pkill and pfind.

Method 2

You don’t need an alternative anymore: since MacOS 10.8 pgrep and pkill are available by default.

Method 3

You could use MacPorts: sudo port install proctools

Here’s the result of port search pgrep:

proctools @0.4pre1 (sysutils)
    pgrep, pkill and pfind for OpenBSD and Darwin (Mac OS X)

Method 4

Assuming that you are using some relatively recent version of Bash in the Mac, you could write your own version of pgrep as function and then add that to your .bashrc file:

function pgrep() {
    ps aux | grep $1 | grep -v grep
}

as for pkill you can use the following:

function pkill() {
    local pid
    pid=$(ps ax | grep $1 | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $1 }')
    kill -9 $pid
    echo -n "Killed $1 (process $pid)"
}

Method 5

Proctools includes pgrep and pkill and is available for OpenBSD and OSX. It hasn’t been updated in a while, but it should still work (at least on OSX which rarely modifies its ABI).

Method 6

you could try killall.
It kills processes by name. Any processes that match the string you pass in are killed.

killall httpd ( kill all apache processes )
killall php ( kill all php process )

If you do

killall -s man ( kill any manual page processes, if a user is using man [command]

it will show you a list of processes that would be killed like below.

kill -TERM 70836

If you want a different signal do the following

killall -9 processname

Method 7

This was my solution for pkill:

#!/bin/sh

for X in `ps acx | grep -i $1 | awk {'print $1'}`; do
    kill -9 $X;
done

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