Many times you want to look for a process to kill it. Here’s how:

$ pgrep bash
2121
2233
2456
2586

the default pgrep command shows the PIDs of all matching processes.

$ pgrep bash -l
2121 bash
2233 bash
2456 bash
2586 bash

the -l option would also show you the process names. This is useful for something like:

pgrep i915 -l
330 i915/signal:0
332 i915/signal:1
333 i915/signal:2
334 i915/signal:4

where each process has a slightly different name.

Killing a process

Simply:

kill [pid] (equivalent to kill -TERM [pid])

If a process is behaving errorneously and it won’t shut down, do:

kill -9 (or -KILL) [pid]

This option forcefully shuts down a process, whereas the default option (without any flags attached) means to kill a process step by step, which is actually -15 or -TERM option.

Easier killing

pkill -9 bash

It is the same as:

kill -9 `pgrep bash`

Simply killing all the instances of process named the same is:

killall [process name]

Written by Joel Mun. Joel likes Rust, GoLang, Typescript, Wasm and more. He also loves to enlarge the boundaries of his knowledge, mainly by reading books and watching lectures on Youtube. Guitar and piano are necessities at his home.