Kill process when PID is constantly changing

Question

When I issue

ps aux | grep mtp

I get

ubuntu-+ 15934  0.1  0.0 519848  7068 ?        Sl   21:13   0:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-mtp --spawner :1.9 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/20

So the PID in this case is 15934. But every new time this is run the PID is different. Is there any other way to kill a process other than by PID?

Check out pkill (to read its manpage, type man pkill), it allows you to kill processes by their filename and other attributes. — Byte Commander, Dec 28 '16 at 21:53
See How to kill the process using the name of the program instead of PID? For deciding between killall and kill, What's the difference between 'killall' and 'pkill'? may be of interest. — Eliah Kagan, Dec 28 '16 at 23:45

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 28 '16 at 21:33

You can use ps to find the PID of the process, then pass that to kill:

kill $(ps -C /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-mtp -o pid=)

The -C flag specifies a command name to search for in the list of processes, and the -o pid= option means ps will print only the PID. The result is passed as the only argument to kill.

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 29 '16 at 15:20

0

I issued

ps aux | grep mtp

which gave me a few mtp related processes and compared with the camera mounted and unmounted to get the specific process

and then

pkill -9 gvfsd-mtp

does the trick. But the supplied answer above I assume will also work!

edited Dec 29 '16 at 15:20

muru

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answered Dec 29 '16 at 15:19

Bachalo

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Kill process when PID is constantly changing

2 Answers2