pkill and pgrep

March 29, 2014

How often do you find yourself doing something like this?

ps aux | grep 'myprocess'
#find the process id

kill -9 2414

While working with Pat Brisbin the other day, I done this same thing and he taught me a great shortcut. There are built in shortcuts for both of these functions.

If you only want to find the process information, you can use pgrep -f myprocess. This does the same thing as ps and then piping that to grep. If you want to actually kill a process you can shorten it all the way to simply pkill -f my_process.

I’ve been wasting my time with extra commands for way too long!

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