How-To: Kill a Process Using the 'pidof' Command

If a process hangs and you want to easily kill it, type in a console:

kill -9 $(pidof process_name)

And replace process_name with a currently running process. For example, to kill rpm you would issue the following:

kill -9 $(pidof rpm)

Or awk, as another example:

kill -9 $(pidof awk)

Or

kill -9 $(pidof awk -1)

pidof is a command that finds the process ID (PID) of a given application. What is inside the ( and ) parenthesis is replaced with a certain PID, and the process which has that PID will be killed.