kill a program

[vinnywright]

just dont let your zombie's fork while fork , they will multiply exponentially and fill your system .........

VINNY

[arinlares]

I used killall. But then I read on some versions of Linux this kills ALL programs the user can kill. Since then I only use pkill since that only kills the program which name you give it.
I'm afraid if I ever change to another distro, I'll accidentally may use killall if I'm used to it.

I'm on Windows right now, but the Ubuntu manpage site has the page for killall. I've been using it under Arch, Debian distros, and Slackware for three years, and no system-nuking has occured (yet). It kills all processes spawned by the command named (killall PROGRAM), which I think is why it's "killall".