CentOS - killall command (to kill all processes with names matching a given pattern)

The pkill utility is a much better alternative to killall. killall is not portable as the behavior of the command is very different across OSs. pkill is portable and behaves the same everywhere. It's also a lot more flexible as it provides a lot of different ways of matching the processes. It also shares the same matching behavior and arguments as the pgrep utility, which allows you to see what processes would be matched and signaled without actually signalling them.

Usage:pkill foo (which would be the same as killall foo)

PSmisc contains the killall utility, along with a few other small, useful tools. It can be added simply with

yum install psmisc

Further to Patrick's solution, the functionality of the killall command can be replicated with the following:

pkill -15 [process name]

For example, to kill all running memcached processes, one would write the following:

pkill -15 memcached

The '-15' is the numeric representation of a SIGTERM POSIX signal. To get a list of all POSIX signals which can be fired at a process, use the following command:

kill -l

This will return the following table:

1) SIGHUP       2) SIGINT       3) SIGQUIT      4) SIGILL       5) SIGTRAP
6) SIGABRT      7) SIGBUS       8) SIGFPE       9) SIGKILL      10) SIGUSR1
11) SIGSEGV     12) SIGUSR2     13) SIGPIPE     14) SIGALRM     15) SIGTERM
16) SIGSTKFLT   17) SIGCHLD     18) SIGCONT     19) SIGSTOP     20) SIGTSTP
21) SIGTTIN     22) SIGTTOU     23) SIGURG      24) SIGXCPU     25) SIGXFSZ
26) SIGVTALRM   27) SIGPROF     28) SIGWINCH    29) SIGIO       30) SIGPWR
31) SIGSYS      34) SIGRTMIN    35) SIGRTMIN+1  36) SIGRTMIN+2  37) SIGRTMIN+3
38) SIGRTMIN+4  39) SIGRTMIN+5  40) SIGRTMIN+6  41) SIGRTMIN+7  42) SIGRTMIN+8
43) SIGRTMIN+9  44) SIGRTMIN+10 45) SIGRTMIN+11 46) SIGRTMIN+12 47) SIGRTMIN+13
48) SIGRTMIN+14 49) SIGRTMIN+15 50) SIGRTMAX-14 51) SIGRTMAX-13 52) SIGRTMAX-12
53) SIGRTMAX-11 54) SIGRTMAX-10 55) SIGRTMAX-9  56) SIGRTMAX-8  57) SIGRTMAX-7
58) SIGRTMAX-6  59) SIGRTMAX-5  60) SIGRTMAX-4  61) SIGRTMAX-3  62) SIGRTMAX-2
63) SIGRTMAX-1  64) SIGRTMAX

Further information on what each signal does can be found here.