Bash function to kill process

Question

I made an alias for this function in order to kill processes in bash:

On my .bashrc file

  kill_process(){
    # $1 being a parameter for the process name
    kill $(ps ax | grep "$1" | awk '{print $1}')
}

alias kill_process=kill_process

So, suppose I want to kill the meteor process:

Let's see all meteor processes:

ps aux | grep 'meteor' | awk '{print $2}' 

21565
21602
21575
21546

Calling the kill_process function with the alias

kill_process meteor

bash: kill: (21612) - No such process

So, the kill_process function effectively terminates the meteor processes, but it's kill command looks for an inexistent pid. Notice the pid 21612 wasn't listed by ps aux | grep. Any ideas to improve the kill_process function to avoid this?

Answer 1

I think in your case the killall command would do what you want:

killall NAME

Answer 2

The standard way of killing processes by name is using killall, as Swoogan suggests in his answer.

As to your kill_process function, the grep expression that filters ps will match the very own grep process (you can see this running the pipeline without awk), but by the time kill is invoked, that process is no longer running. That's the message you see.

Each time you run the command, grep runs again with a new PID: that's the reason you can't find it on the list when you test it.

You could:

1. Run ps first, pipe it into a file or variable, then grep
2. Filter grep's PID out of the list

3. (Simpler) supress kill output:

   kill $(...) 2>/dev/null