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Comment by sethhochberg | Hacker News Reader

iTerm's killer feature for me is the special paste modes - it is trivially easy to do things like visually select a block of processes numbers from ps and then paste that block as a space-delimited list on one line to kill them, etc. Terminal.app is fine for most things but can't do stuff like this.

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    ps aux | grep 'thing' | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill

Not the same. An option for block selection (say using alt-click) would be a great addition to a terminal.

Someday I get sick of running such long lines I may code that for roxterm.

My own version of that command:

    ps -ef | grep 'thing' | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}' | sh

On most of my systems, I tend to make a shell script out of it and usually save it to /usr/local/bin/kll (and I don't care about grepping out grep because it doesn't seem to affect anything).

grrr....

    pkill thing

    killall thing

And then there's also pgrep instead of ps | grep

killall and pkill don't work if the thing I'm trying to grep for isn't the first word of the process string.

Let's say I'm trying to kill 'python foobar.py' but I don't want to kill 'python bazquux.py'. The only thing it'll respond to with killall is 'killall python', but then both of them will respond. So I have to grep out the parameter and then kill that, with: ps -ef | grep 'foobar.py' | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}' | sh

Check out -f parameter of pkill.

Ooh... nice! Thanks!

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