pkill Command Examples

Signal process by name. Mostly used for stopping processes. More information: https://www.manned.org/pkill.

• Kill all processes which match:

pkill "{{process_name}}"

• Kill all processes which match their full command instead of just the process name:

pkill {{[-f|--full]}} "{{command_name}}"

• Force kill matching processes (can't be blocked):

pkill -9 "{{process_name}}"

• Send SIGUSR1 signal to processes which match:

pkill -USR1 "{{process_name}}"

• Kill the main firefox process to close the browser:

pkill {{[-o|--oldest]}} "{{firefox}}"