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  • Is there a reason why you wouldn't use pkill -f to kill the matching processes, and why you rather introduce a race condition by first calling pgrep -f and then kill? Commented Sep 24, 2020 at 18:06
  • pkill just sends sigterm and in my case, it did not kill any of my processes. pkill -SIGKILL also did not work. pgrep -f returns the pid of matching processes and as I stated, this worked perfectly while the others did not. Commented Sep 24, 2020 at 20:56
  • You will notice that pkill also has the -f option which makes it match the pattern against the full command line, just like pgrep -f does. The difference being that pkill also sends a signal to the matching processes. With pkill -f -SIGKILL pattern you therefore send the KILL signal to any process whose command line matches pattern. Commented Sep 24, 2020 at 22:45
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    I tried "pkill -f -SIGKILL pattern" but didn't kill my processes but "kill -9 $(pgrep -f somepattern)" killed all of them. Commented Oct 30, 2020 at 22:03
  • pkill -f -SIGKILL pattern fails miserably. it even reports Killed when pattern is a running process or not even a running process. what?!?! the other methods, like this answer, works. something is not right with pkill Commented Jul 9, 2021 at 16:25