how to kill a process, if we have the process name?

[rasmidas]

Inside a shell script, how can we kill a process during run time, if we know only the process name.

[Luuk]

On linux there's a util called 'pidof'

/tmp # pidof apache
/tmp # pidof httpd2-prefork
19760 19740 19730 19672 19607 19604 7665 6781 6778 2276 2270

To kill the prcess(es) of i.e. apache, you could do:

kill `pidof httpd2-prefork`

[sicarie]

Or, if you're interested in killing everything related to the process, you can use killall. For instance, if Mozilla freezes:

killall mozilla