It has been a while I have been using kill command to stop the non responsive running process. But until yesterday then I found out there is a much simple linux command that can do the job of kill and even much better way.

It is pkill command. Pkill is written for Solaris7 and later has been implement for Linux and NetBSD. Unlike the kill command which you need to find out the specific process id to do the killing. With pkill, all you need is just to know the process name, if can’t remember the full or just maybe part of the process name.

So if I want to kill my firefox, just type in

pkill firefox

However, it might also kill process name match the search, maybe there is some other process also call firefox-bookmark or etc.