What’s the Fastest Way to Kill a Process?

I’m talking in terms of keystrokes, and you don’t know the PID.

pgrep fooapp | xargs kill - 9

That’s twenty-three characters, including whitespace, excluding the process name. What’s quicker?

Posted by Ian on October 23rd, 2006 Filed in Tips Tricks and Hacks, Linux, Unix, Command Line

2 Responses to “What’s the Fastest Way to Kill a Process?”

  1. Kelvin Says:
    October 24th, 2006 at 1:40 am

    killall fooapp

    Ok ok, just kidding. But, ‘ServerAlias thoughtdeposit.net’ in is only 30 characters long :P

  2. Ian Says:
    October 30th, 2006 at 11:47 am

    Yea, the thing about killall is it doesn’t seem to come standard with all distros :(, but if you have it, that would be the quicket way methinks.

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