pkill

pkill (see pgrep) is a command-line utility initially written for use with the Solaris 7 operating system. It has since been reimplemented for Linux and some BSDs.

As with the kill and killall commands, pkill is used to send signals to processes. 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 a USR1 signal to acroread process:

pkill -USR1 acroread

References

pkill(1) – Solaris 11.4 User Commands Reference Manual
pkill(1): look up processes based on name and other attributes – Linux User Commands Manual

External links

v t e Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins
File system	cat chattr chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fuser ln ls mkdir mv pax pwd rm rmdir split tee touch type umask
Processes	at bg crontab fg kill nice ps time
User environment	env exit logname mesg talk tput uname who write
Text processing	awk basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fold head iconv join m4 more nl paste patch printf read sed sort strings tail tr troff uniq vi wc xargs
Shell builtins	alias cd echo test unset wait
Searching	find grep
Documentation	man
Software development	ar ctags lex make nm strip yacc
Miscellaneous	bc cal expr lp od sleep true and false
Categories Standard Unix programs Unix SUS2008 utilities List

Example usage

See also

References

External links