Signals processes based on name and other attributes.
The pkill command allows you to kill or send signals to processes by their name. It works similarly to killall, targeting all running instances of a program. If you need to kill a specific single process, use its PID with the kill command.
pkill [options] [pattern]
-o: Signal only the oldest (least recently started) of the matching processes.
-n: Signal only the newest (most recently started) of the matching processes.
-P: Signal only processes whose parent process ID matches the given list.
-g: Signal only processes in the specified process groups.
-t: Signal only processes running on the specified terminal.
Process Name: The pattern to match against the process names (supports regular expressions).
Find a process PID by name:
pgrep -l gaim
2979 gaim
Kill the process by name:
pkill gaim
In summary: kill targets a PID, while pkill targets a command name or pattern.