Shell Programming and Scripting

Hey,

I am fiddling with a little script to kill a certain program if it freezes. Basically I want to do something like this:

Code:

ps -A | grep firefox-bin | read -d ' ' pid
kill $pid

The problem lies when I pipe the output of grep into read. That part does not seem to work the way I want it to, i.e., it does not get the pid into the shell variable pid. How can I make this work the way I want it?

~/

edit::

Ok, I managed the following,

Code:

#!/bin/bash

ps -A | grep wish > tmp
read -d ' ' pid < tmp
kill $pid
rm tmp

But can someone tell me how to do what I originally wanted, i.e., without a temp file?

Your system may already have the "pkill" command which will do exactly what you're trying to do - have a look to see if it exists on your system.

Another way to do it is:

ps -A | grep whatever | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill

Cheers
ZB

Thanks zazzybob,

All quite helpful. Looks like I have some man pages to read.

~/

i don't know witch unix flavor you use but with linux you can also use

kill $( pidof firefox-bin )

Thanks Becket. Indeed, I do use Linux (sorry for not mentioning what I use for a system) and that works like a charm. It's truly what I like about UNIX, i.e., that there is usually more than one way to solve a problem.