How to kill a process with 'kill' combined with 'grep'

Question

I'd like to kill a process/script with a simple command using. At the moment I do the following

ps -ef | grep myscriptname
kill 123456

But is there a way to maybe combine the 2 command together so I don't need to look and manually write the pid, something like this kill grep myscriptname?

Answer 1

You want pkill:

pkill myscriptname

On some systems there is a similar tool called killall, but be careful because on Solaris it really does kill everything!

Note that there is also pgrep which you can use to replace your ps | grep pipeline:

pgrep myscriptname

It prints the PID for you, and nothing else.