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I have two processes that are temporarily spawned and I need to kill them. Here are the processes from ps aux

david 38329 0.0 5.0 3916476 104624 s002 S 11:33AM 0:17.43 /Applications/Firefox.a david 38319 0.0 0.0 2442472 1028 s002 S 11:33AM 0:00.10 Xvfb -br -screen 0 800x david 38268 0.0 0.2 3012352 4960 ?? S 11:02AM 0:00.24 /System/Library/Framewo david 38261 0.0 3.4 3913364 70724 s002 S 11:02AM 0:08.51 /Applications/Firefox.a

How would I kill all processes that are either Xvfb or Firefox ?

Update: I was able to use $ sudo killall Xvfb to kill that process, but am still having trouble doing the same with Firefox:

davids-Mac-mini:financials david$ ps aux|grep firefox david /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -foreground david /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -foreground david grep firefox davids-Mac-mini:financials david$ sudo killall firefox No matching processes were found
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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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If you want to do it by name:

killall firefox

If you want to kill a specific process, e.g. the first Firefox instance:

kill 38329

and if the process doesn't want to go, you can use:

kill -KILL 38261

There should be no way for a program to keep the OS from terminating it RIGHT NOW.

Update: To see a list of all available process names for the killall command, you can use:

ps -axco command | sort | uniq
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  • $ sudo killall Firefox No matching processes were found Commented May 18, 2012 at 20:53
  • Corrected to killall firefox, the process that is actually running is the firefox binary inside the Firefox.app bundle. Commented May 18, 2012 at 20:56
  • Please see update in question. Commented May 18, 2012 at 20:58
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    killall firefox-bin should work for you. At least Firefox 13 uses firefox as process name. Commented May 18, 2012 at 21:01
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You could do 

kill `pgrep Xvfb` `pgrep Firefox`

You can add -f to search the entire command, in case it doesn't find it without the -f.

pgrep -f Firefox

There is also pkill which takes the same input as pgrep

pkill Xvfb; pkill -f Firefox;
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  • I don't have pkill or pkill on my machine. How would I do the same with killall ? Commented May 18, 2012 at 20:58
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This function kills all processes related to an application. You can call it like this: killapp chrome

killapp () { processes=($(pidof $1)) for pid in $processes do kill -9 $pid done }

If you are in macos and don't have pidof installed you can install it with brew or use pgrep instead.

I think pidof works best since it finds all processes related to a given application whereas it is not always the case with pgrep.

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