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Pkill

Command-line utility for signaling processes

pkill (see pgrep) is a command-line utility initially written for use with the Solaris 7 operating system in 1998. It has since been reimplemented for Linux and some BSDs.

As with the kill and killall commands, pkill is used to send signals to processes. The pkill command allows the use of extended regular expression patterns and other matching criteria.

01Example usage

Kill the most recently created acroread process:

pkill -n acroread

Send a USR1 signal to acroread process:

pkill -USR1 acroread
Watch videos about PkillExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article Pkill, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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