Use pkill to end processes on Ubuntu rather than kill (cos it’s faster)

I’m not saying Ubuntu (or Linux in general) is buggy, but things aren’t always flawless. There are times when applications and background processes freeze, hang, or choke up for whatever reason – be it the app’s fault, or a system fault.

And when I can’t quit it normally, I tend to kill it (a violent yet technical term).

To kill a process on Ubuntu, I use the kill or killall commands, plus the relevant process number, which I glean by running top.

However, I recently discovered — yes; I’m always late the party — that the pkill command removes the effort in ending processes on Ubuntu.

I need simply issue pkill firefox, for example, and that will then automatically search my list of running processes to match processes called firefox, and kill it.

Much easier than before.

If your invite to the process thwarting party was similarly lost, now you know too!