How can I kill a process by name instead of PID?

pkill firefox

More information: http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_pkill.htm

Also possible to use:

pkill -f "Process name"

For me, it worked up perfectly. It was what I have been looking for. pkill doesn't work with name without the flag.

When -f is set, the full command line is used for pattern matching.

You can kill processes by name with killall <name>

killall sends a signal to all processes running any of the specified commands. If no signal name is specified, SIGTERM is sent.

Signals can be specified either by name (e.g. -HUP or -SIGHUP ) or by number (e.g. -1) or by option -s.

If the command name is not regular expression (option -r) and contains a slash (/), processes executing that particular file will be selected for killing, independent of their name.

But if you don't see the process with ps aux, you probably won't have the right to kill it ...