How can I kill Firefox by console?
note: do not use kill -9
unless you have tried everything else. always try kill
(without -9
) first. for more explanation see this question and answers: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/8916/why-not-kill-9-a-process.
the command to script-kill processes is pkill
and killall
. see the wikipedia page of pkill
and killall
for more details.
I will provide some examples for pkill
. killall
works similar to pkill
.
pkill -f firefox
This will kill all processes which have the string 'firefox' in the command.
Note that this will kill all processes which have the string firefox
in the command.
For example if you have a gedit open editing a file called firefox.txt like this:
$ gedit firefox.txt &
$ pgrep -fl firefox
10959 gedit firefox.txt
30077 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin
30123 /usr/lib/firefox/plugin-container /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so 30077 plugin true
Then doing a pkill -f firefox
will also kill the gedit process.
You can prevent this by telling pkill
to kill only exact matches using pkill -x /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin
. killall
has the switch -e
which has the same effect.
You can create an alias in bash:
alias kf='pkill -f firefox'
Now you can use kf
to kill firefox.