Editing Kill (command) (section)

====Related programs====
*[[killall]] - on some variations of Unix, such as [[Solaris (operating system)|Solaris]], this utility is automatically invoked when the system is going through a [[Shutdown (computing)|shutdown]]. It behaves much like the kill command above, but instead of sending a signal to an individual process, the signal is sent to all processes on the system. However, on others such as [[IRIX]], [[Linux]], and [[FreeBSD]], an argument is supplied specifying the name of the process (or processes) to kill. For instance, to kill a process such as an instance of the [[XMMS]] music player invoked by <code>xmms</code>, the user would run the command <code>killall xmms</code>. This would kill all processes named <code>xmms</code>, and is equivalent to <code>kill `pidof xmms`</code> on systems like Solaris.
*[[pkill]] - signals processes based on name and other attributes. It was introduced in Solaris 7 and has since been reimplemented for Linux, [[NetBSD]] and [[OpenBSD]]. pkill makes killing processes based on their name much more convenient: e.g. to kill a process named ''firefox'' without pkill (and without [[pgrep]]), one would have to type <code>kill `ps&nbsp;--no-headers&nbsp;-C&nbsp;firefox&nbsp;-o&nbsp;pid`</code> whereas with pkill, one can simply type <code>pkill firefox</code>.
*[[xkill]] - if called without any parameters, the mouse cursor changes from an arrow to an "x" icon, and the user can click on a window to force the X server to close the connection with the client owning the window. This often causes the process to terminate when it detects that its connection to the X server has been closed.