Linux101 Find and Kill a Process

List all the processes

Two approaches are demonstrated below:

$ ps -ef

……

$ smx       1822     1  0 11:38 ?        00:00:49 gnome-terminal
$ smx       1823  1822  0 11:38 ?        00:00:00 gnome-pty-helper
$ smx       1824  1822  0 11:38 pts/0    00:00:02 bash
$ smx       1827     1  4 11:38 ?        00:26:28 /usr/lib/firefox-3.6.18/firefox-bin
$ smx       1857  1822  0 11:38 pts/1    00:00:00 bash
$ smx       1880  1619  0 11:38 ?        00:00:00 update-notifier
……
$ smx      11946  1824  0 21:41 pts/0    00:00:00 ps -ef

Or：

$ ps -aux

……

$ smx       1822  0.1  0.8  58484 18152 ?        Sl   11:38   0:49 gnome-terminal
$ smx       1823  0.0  0.0   1988   712 ?        S    11:38   0:00 gnome-pty-helper
$ smx       1824  0.0  0.1   6820  3776 pts/0    Ss   11:38   0:02 bash
$ smx       1827  4.3  5.8 398196 119568 ?       Sl   11:38  26:13 /usr/lib/firefox-3.6.18/firefox-bin
$ smx       1857  0.0  0.1   6688  3644 pts/1    Ss   11:38   0:00 bash
$ smx       1880  0.0  0.6  41536 12620 ?        S    11:38   0:00 update-notifier
……
$ smx      11953  0.0  0.0   2716  1064 pts/0    R+   21:42   0:00 ps -aux

Kill a Target Process

Suppose we want to determinate Firefox. To kill it, type and run:

$ kill -s 9 `ps -aux | grep firefox | awk '{print $2}'`

Step 1. ps -aux lists all the processes.

Step 2. grep firefox takes as input the process list generated by the command of Step 1. and select out all the Firefox related processes.

Step 3. awk {print $2} prints the second column of the result generated by the command of Step 2. That is, the PIDs related to Firefox and leave it as the input argument for the final command kill -s 9.

This is what the killing one-liner is. Dont!

References

[1]	Find and kill a process in one line using bash and regex
[2]	linux 查看某进程 并杀死进程 ps grep kill