How to kill all processes with a given partial name? [closed]

Use pkill -f, which matches the pattern for any part of the command line

pkill -f my_pattern

Just in case it doesn't work, try to use this one as well:

pkill -9 -f my_pattern

Kill all processes matching the string "myProcessName":

ps -ef | grep 'myProcessName' | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -r kill -9

Source: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1138/ps-ef-grep-process-grep-v-grep-awk-print-2-xargs-kill-9

What's this code doing?

The ps -ef produces a list of process id's on the computer visible to this user. The pipe grep filters that down for rows containing that string. The grep -v grep says don't match on the process itself doing the grepping. The pipe awk print says split the rows on default delimiter whitespace and filter to the second column which is our process id. The pipe xargs spins up a new process to send all those pid's to kill -9, ending them all.

The above code is bad, dangerous, ugly and hackish for several reasons.

1. If the code being force-ended is doing any database ops or secure transactions with low probability race conditions, some fraction of a percent of the time, atomicity of that transaction will be wrecked, producing undefined behavior. kill -9 takes no prisoners. If your code is sensitive to this, try replacing the xargs kill part with a transmitted flag that requests a graceful shutdown, and only if that request is denied, last-resort to kill -9

2. There's a non zero possibility that you will accidentally end the operating system or caused undefined behavior in an unrelated process, leading to whole system instability because ps -ef lists every possible process that could exist, and you can't be sure some weird 3rd party library shares your process name, or that in the time between read and execute kill -9, the processid had changed to something else, and now you've accidentally ended some random process you didn't intend to.

But, if you understand the risks and control for them with very unique names, and you're ok with a few dropped transactions or occasional corruption in data, then 99.9% of the time yer gonna be fine. If there's a problem, reboot the computer, make sure there aren't any process collisions. It's because of code like this that makes the tech support script: "Have you tried restarting your computer" a level 5 meme.

If you need more flexibility in selecting the processes use

for KILLPID in `ps ax | grep 'my_pattern' | awk ' { print $1;}'`; do   kill -9 $KILLPID;done

You can use grep -e etc.