From LQWiki

The killall command kills processes by name of the command being run, alleviating the need to run ps to find the pid before issuing a kill command. Signals other than the kill signal can also be sent.

Caution should be used on non-Linux systems, where killall may have a different behavior, like killing all processes attached to the current terminal.

Example

$ killall mozilla-bin

Kills a locked-up Mozilla browser.

Related commands

These all relate process control

• kill - Kill processes by ID.
• xkill - Force the X server to close connections from clients.
• sleep - Delay the process calling this.

External links

• killall man page