sudo to kill output of ps, awk, xargs

This is an ugly hack, and kill will complain, but it works (for me, at least):

sudo kill `ps -ae | grep foo` &>/dev/null

The &>/dev/null part is optional; include it if you do not want to see all of kill's complaints.

I know there is probably a better way of doing this, but this is what I use.

As already mentioned pgrep and pkill are your friends:

sudo pkill `pgrep -u root foo`

If for some reason you do not have pgrep and pkill, you can do something like this:

for n in $(ps -u root | grep foo | cut -d ' ' -f 2); do sudo kill $n; done