pkill won't work on firefox anymore

cokedude · October 9, 2011, 12:43am

Can someone tell me why pkill won't work on firefox anymore?

kvmreddy · October 9, 2011, 4:31am

Its working on my Linux Box. I am using CentOS.

fpmurphy · October 9, 2011, 10:09am

pkill works just fine with Firefox.

Show us how you are using pkill and somebody will be able to show you what you are doing wrong.

cokedude · October 9, 2011, 11:27pm

$ pkill firefox

alister · October 10, 2011, 1:10am

fireffox? Hehehe. Is that a typo only in your forum post or is it present in the command you've been using on your system?

Regards,
Alister

cokedude · October 10, 2011, 2:31am

Its a typo ;). I'm typing it right in my terminal :).

fpmurphy · October 10, 2011, 9:28am

With firefox running, what is the output of

$ ps -ef | grep firefox
$ pgrep firefox

cokedude · October 11, 2011, 1:59pm

I'm being extra thorough :).

[bob@hi ~]$ ps -ef | grep firefox
bob       2421  1483  4 Oct10 ?        01:16:22 /usr/lib/xulrunner-2/xulrunner-bin /usr/lib/firefox-4/application.ini
bob       2474  2421  4 Oct10 ?        01:11:54 /usr/lib/xulrunner-2/plugin-container /home/bob/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so -grebase /usr/lib/xulrunner-2 -appbase /usr/lib/firefox-4 2421 true plugin
bob       8350  6363  0 13:57 pts/1    00:00:00 grep --color=auto firefox
[bob@hi ~]$ pgrep firefox
[bob@hi ~]$ pkill firefox
[bob@hi ~]$ ps -ef | grep firefox
bob       2421  1483  4 Oct10 ?        01:16:26 /usr/lib/xulrunner-2/xulrunner-bin /usr/lib/firefox-4/application.ini
bob       2474  2421  4 Oct10 ?        01:11:54 /usr/lib/xulrunner-2/plugin-container /home/bob/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so -grebase /usr/lib/xulrunner-2 -appbase /usr/lib/firefox-4 2421 true plugin
bob       8354  6363  0 13:57 pts/1    00:00:00 grep --color=auto firefox

alister · October 11, 2011, 2:28pm

In your ps output, there is no firefox command running. There is however a xulrunner-bin that is responsible for executing firefox.

By default, pgrep does not match patterns against command line arguments (that requires -f).

Regards,
Alister

lazytech · October 11, 2011, 5:00pm

You can aways try

pkill -9 firefox

the -9 is a signal that tells the pkill command to be an aggressive kill. I would suggest looking at the different signals you can send to a process with kill or pkill by doing a

man pkill

or

man kill

alister · October 11, 2011, 8:14pm

The signal sent is irrelevant if there's no process to receive it.

In particular, pay attention to the semantics of 'pattern' and the -f option.

Regards,
Alister

fpmurphy · October 12, 2011, 9:45am

That explains why some of us have no problems pkilling Firefox and some do. You are using an older version of Firefox.

More modern versions of Firefox on Linux invoke a $LIBDIR/firefox/firefox executable and not xulrunner.