how to find a process by name and kill it

[cruzerMicro]

i want to find a running process call "iHackedYou.sh" and kill it. how do i do that? i tried:

find iHackedYou.sh -exec kill '{}' \;

but does not work

[wje_lf]

Enter this at the command line

man killall

and all will be revealed.

[Cabhan]

Well, there are actually several ways to do this. The most straightforward would be using the "killall" command. The "kill" command takes a process ID, the "killall" command takes a process name.

A second way would be to use either the "top" command or "ps aux" to see all running processes, find the PID that you want to end, and use "kill" to do so. This way, if you have two instances of Firefox running, you can end only the one you want to end.

And the third way, and most complicated, would be to look at the numbered directories in /proc/. Each of these is a PID. Inside each of these directories is a "cmdline" file that tells the command run to get that PID. You could search these for the command you want, and kill the appropriate PIDs.

It's a big world out there!

[likwid]

pgrep string | xargs ps

This will show any process that has string in its process name.

pkill string

This will kill all processes that contain string anywhere in their process name. A little dangerous, cause you might kill processes you don't want to.

[Dapper Dan]

Often Firefox will freeze when viewing Youtube videos. I have to xkill Firefox, but it will still be running, hindering me from restarting it. I find htop the best solution. Just open it, find the process and kill it as you would in regular top. The thing I like about htop is that you can easily move up and down through the processes stopping at the one you want and killing it with two key presses.

[Unicron]

Not terribly elegant, I usually just use

kill -9 `pgrep string`

[boggy]

ps aux : will also show you your processes and you can also you killall -9 pid#

[ghostdog74]

A little dangerous, cause you might kill processes you don't want to.

you can use -x option to get the exact process name...

[Lakshmipathi]

And the third way, and most complicated, would be to look at the numbered directories in /proc/. Each of these is a PID. Inside each of these directories is a "cmdline" file that tells the command run to get that PID. You could search these for the command you want, and kill the appropriate PIDs.

It's a big world out there!

I never heard about this before ....every directory under proc is a directory of a process.
thanks i'll explore those files

[anomie]

I recommend pkill. Check out the -f option for more precision.

man 1 pkill