Occasionally on my server I’ll get dead processes that fit a specific command pattern, and I need to kill them. However, I don’t want to killall, as other processes of the same program are still running normally. Here’s a handy one-liner I just whipped up to do this:
sudo kill `ps ax -o"pid,command" | grep -E 'command_pattern' | awk '{print $1}'`
ps ax -o"pid,command"
gives you a list of all processes, just showing pid and command.
grep -E 'command_pattern'
searches for a regex command pattern.
awk '{print $1}'
returns the first column—the pid. This is the ultimate output of the backticked expression, which is substituted as the parameter for kill.
Hope you find it useful!