Combining two commands into one

spes_hominis · 05-16-2007, 08:46 AM

Due to an unresolved bug in Flash (fix it,Adobe!),Firefox keeps locking up,hard. Xkill gets rid of the window,but leaves the process running;the only way to shut it down cleanly is by grepping for the process number:

Code:

ps -A | grep firefox-bin
5635 ?     00:13:01 firefox-bin

Then doing

Code:

kill number

How do I pass the process number into kill to avoid typing it out each time?

MS3FGX · 05-16-2007, 08:50 AM

You could just do:

Code:

killall firefox-bin

spes_hominis · 05-16-2007, 08:52 AM

That worked,thanks! Why doesn't kill accept process names?

kees-jan · 05-16-2007, 09:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by spes_hominis

That worked,thanks! Why doesn't kill accept process names?

Kill is designed to kill one specific process. So, if multiple processes with the same name exist, which one to kill?

The killall command avoids such confusion by just killing all processes with that name ;-)

Nice sig, by the way. You should finish it with "it != difficult" for maximum effect ;-)

Groetjes,

Kees-Jan

pwc101 · 05-16-2007, 09:18 AM

You might also like pkill and pgrep, both of which accept process names, but work much like their p-less counterparts. For example, to kill all instances of firefox, you could grep out all their process numbers, and then kill them all with kill:

Code:

ps -ef | grep firefox
kill -9 <process numbers from above command>

Or, you could just do

Code:

pkill -9 firefox

which would have the same effect.

marozsas · 05-16-2007, 10:51 AM

I know your problem was solved with the killall command, but I'd like to show just another way:

Quote:

Originally Posted by spes_hominis

How do I pass the process number into kill to avoid typing it out each time?

Code:

kill $(ps -A | grep firefox-bin | awk '{print $1}')

in this way, the PID value from ps is placed as a argument to kill, the exact thing you asked for.