pkill

pkill is a command line utility initially written for use with the Solaris 7 operating system. It has since been reimplemented for Linux and OpenBSD.

As with the kill and killall commands, pkill is used to send signals. The pkill command allows the use of extended regular expression patterns and other matching criteria.

Example usage

Kill the most recently created acroread process

$ pkill -n acroread

Send USR1 signal to acroread process

pkill -USR1 acroread

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Categories Standard Unix programs Unix SUS2008 utilities List

Example usage

See also