Your code isn't that bad actually, there's just a few things to learn which will help simplify what you do. Remember you can use 'exit' to make the script quit at any time, which helps avoid n+1...
read PID < /tmp/php.pid
echo "Killing $PID"
kill "$PID" || echo "Couldn't kill PID" You should run this script under the same user that ran the PHP script (presumably apache), because the system...