UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

ps -C a*
returns the list of the process I need to kill.
but
ps -C a* -o pid | kill
does not work and I can't get the syntax right.
Thanks for any help

Let me answer my question (thanks to searching the archives of this forum...)
ps -A | grep a.fcg | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill
does the job.

I am not sure though why my first syntax does not work...

The kill command does not read from standard input, instead it examines its argument list. For something like:
command | kill
to work, you would need a kill command that took no arguments. After kill was was running, you would then type in pids one per line. When finished, you would type cntl-D. That sort of imaginary kill command would also work reading pids from a pipeline.

type
ps -ft <ttyno>

then

kill -9 <pidno>
one by one or
kill -9 <pidno> <pidno> <pidno>

First, you have missed the whole point of this thread. You cannot kill another user's processes unless you are root. What we are discussing here is how to allow a non-root user to kill the processes of another user.

Second, doing a "kill -9" as the first thing you try is very poor policy. This forum has dozens of threads involving problems that were caused by that.