Question

11

How to kill firefox from command line

rated 0 times [ 11] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 15976 / 2 Years ago, thu, august 25, 2022, 1:26:38

How to kill firefox from the command line?

I have tried:

pkill firefox # the command was known to work previously

pkill -9 firefox

kill -9 firefox # descibed in https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/8916/when-should-i-not-kill-9-a-process

bash: kill: firefox: arguments must be process or job IDs

killall firefox #described in https://appuals.com/restart-firefox-command-line/

All in vain.

The output of

ps aux | grep -i firefox | grep -v grep

is

v           2419  1.7  7.7 4026824 458876 ?      Sl   12:56   0:51 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -new-window

v           2483  0.0  0.6 190540 38684 ?        Sl   12:56   0:00 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -parentBuildID 20210927210923 -prefsLen 1 -prefMapSize 246254 -appdir /usr/lib/firefox/browser 2419 true socket

v           2515  0.0  2.0 2407620 119704 ?      Sl   12:56   0:01 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 1 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 102 -prefMapSize 246254 -jsInit 286204 -parentBuildID 20210927210923 -appdir /usr/lib/firefox/browser 2419 true tab

v           2553  0.5  2.6 2572708 156816 ?      Sl   12:56   0:16 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 2 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 268 -prefMapSize 246254 -jsInit 286204 -parentBuildID 20210927210923 -appdir /usr/lib/firefox/browser 2419 true tab

v           2581  0.0  1.6 2406928 99740 ?       Sl   12:56   0:01 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 3 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 4889 -prefMapSize 246254 -jsInit 286204 -parentBuildID 20210927210923 -appdir /usr/lib/firefox/browser 2419 true tab

v           2612  0.3  3.7 2648096 225204 ?      Sl   12:56   0:09 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 4 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 5588 -prefMapSize 246254 -jsInit 286204 -parentBuildID 20210927210923 -appdir /usr/lib/firefox/browser 2419 true tab

v           2866  0.0  1.2 2373260 72628 ?       Sl   12:58   0:00 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 5 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 5701 -prefMapSize 246254 -jsInit 286204 -parentBuildID 20210927210923 -appdir /usr/lib/firefox/browser 2419 true tab

v           2998  0.0  0.6 194220 39176 ?        Sl   13:12   0:00 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -parentBuildID 20210927210923 -prefsLen 5926 -prefMapSize 246254 -appdir /usr/lib/firefox/browser 2419 true rdd

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answered 2 Years ago antorchestr · Accepted Answer

tl;dr: pkill -f firefox does the trick.

I found this in the pkill/pgrep manpages:

The process name used for matching is limited to the 15 characters present in the output of /proc/pid/stat. Use the
-f option to match against the complete command line, /proc/pid/cmdline.

With /usr/lib/firefox/firefox having PID 691953 when testing locally on my machine, I found the following in /proc/691953/stat:

691953 (GeckoMain) .... # truncated by me

Doing a pkill GeckoMain killed firefox as promised. killall GeckoMain works too.

The simplest workaround is probably to supply the -f flag to pkill to match against /proc/<pid>/cmdline, which in my case contained /usr/lib/firefox/firefox.