Pkill


pkill is a command-line utility initially written for use with the Solaris 7 operating system in 1998. It has since been reimplemented for Linux and some BSDs.
As with the kill and killall commands, pkill is used to send signals to processes. The pkill command allows the use of extended regular expression patterns and other matching criteria.

Example usage

Kill the most recently created acroread process:

pkill -n acroread

Send a USR1 signal to acroread process:

pkill -USR1 acroread