The problem is that if you are killing the same process repeatedly, it’s very tedious to have to figure out the process ID every single time so that you can kill it… so here’s the easier way to do it.
The Old Way
The classic way of killing processes meant you’d first need to use the ps command piped through grep to find the process you are trying to kill:
Then to kill the process, you’d have to use the kill command:
The New Way
Instead of going through all of that, you can simply use the pkill command if you already know the process name or part of it.
It’s as simple as that. You should note that pkill will kill all processes matching the search text, in this case swiftfox
If you want to see what process names are matched before using the pkill command, you can use the pgrep command. Passing the -l switch tells pgrep to show the process name as well.
Swiftfox seems to crash on me a lot, so I’ve unfortunately had to use this command a lot lately.
