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How to kill processes by their name

Written by Solène, on 25 August 2016.
Tags: #unix

Comments on Fediverse/Mastodon

If you want to kill a process by its name instead of its PID number, which is easier if you have to kill processes from the same binary, here are the commands depending of your operating system:

FreeBSD / Linux

$ killall pid_name

OpenBSD

$ pkill pid_name

Solaris

Be careful with Solaris killall. With no argument, the command will send a signal to every active process, which is not something you want.

$ killall pid_name