How to kill all processes matching a name?

Question

Say I want to kill every process containing the word amarok. I can print out the commands I want to execute. But how do I actually make the shell execute them. ie.

ps aux | grep -ie amarok | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}' Output: kill -9 3052 kill -9 3071 kill -9 3076 kill -9 3077 kill -9 3079 kill -9 3080 kill -9 3082 kill -9 3083 kill -9 3084 kill -9 3085 kill -9 3086 kill -9 3087 kill -9 3088 kill -9 3089 kill -9 4031 

Answer 1

From man 1 pkill

-f     The pattern is normally only matched against the process name.        When -f is set, the full command line is used. 

Which means, for example, if we see these lines in ps aux:

apache   24268  0.0  2.6 388152 27116 ?        S    Jun13   0:10 /usr/sbin/httpd apache   24272  0.0  2.6 387944 27104 ?        S    Jun13   0:09 /usr/sbin/httpd apache   24319  0.0  2.6 387884 27316 ?        S    Jun15   0:04 /usr/sbin/httpd 

We can kill them all using the pkill -f option:

pkill -f httpd 

Answer 2

ps aux | grep -ie amarok | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9  

xargs(1): xargs -- construct argument list(s) and execute utility. Helpful when you want to pipe in arguments to something like kill or ls or so on.