How to gently kill Firefox process on Linux/OS X

Question

I'm doing some automation with Firefox and although I can open Firefox window from shell, I'm not able to terminate it properly. If I kill Firefox process with kill -3 or kill -2 command the next time I open a new Firefox window it asks me if I want to run in safe-mode. I understand that calling kill -9 could confuse Firefox so it would try to run in safe-mode but -3 should be fine.

Do you have any idea how to gently tell Firefox to close properly?

Answer 1

You can use pkill with the process name:

pkill -f firefox

Answer 2

For Firefox in OSX:

killall 'firefox'

Answer 3

How about

wmctrl -c "Mozilla Firefox"

?

Is it what you want?

NOTEs:

1. This command may need to be fired in same DISPLAY & probably same virtual desktop, on which your firefox is running.
2. Only first matching window will be closed. You may need to loop this command.

Answer 4

In Mac OS X, you could use AppleScript to close it (adjust the application name as necessary; I don't have FireFox installed to test):

$ osascript -e 'tell application "FireFox"
quit
end tell'

This should trigger the same event that the Quit menu command triggers, so FireFox should shut down cleanly.

Obviously, this won't work in Linux.