Is there a way (perhaps a script) how to automate this process:
petr@sova:~$ ps -ef | grep middleman
petr 18445 2312 1 12:06 pts/2 00:00:01 /home/petr/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p362/bin/middleman
petr 18581 13621 0 12:08 pts/0 00:00:00 grep --color=auto middleman
petr@sova:~$ kill -9 18445
Unfortunately, pkill is too weak as I have to go with -9 option on kill.
There is an even simpler solution than the one of qbi: killall let's you kill processes by name, and you can specify signals.
killall -9 middleman
See man killall for more information and extra options (there are quite a few).
As the name suggests, this does send the signal to all processes named middleman. But that's not different from other ways (like pkill). Furthermore, pkill -9 middleman will target processes whose name match but do not equal middleman, such as middleman2, as well.
You can use your shell to do this task for you:
kill -9 $(pidof middleman)
The shell executes the command pidof middleman first. The output of pidof(8) is the process id. So the shell substitutes the pidof-command with the process id and executes kill -9 18845 (or whatever the correct process id is).
The other answers are entirely correct, but I might as well add a third option so all are documented here. You can also use:
pkill -9 middleman
See man pkill for more information and extra options.
It doesn't really matter which of these methods you use. They will all work. But knowing the options if useful if you want to modify the behaviour in some way, since the corresponding man pages show what other matching options are available.
Just for fun, I'd like to add a more manual, old school way
kill -9 `ps aux | grep middleman | awk '{print $2}'`
killall -9 -ir regex_pattern
which is interactive(safe) and matches the partial command name.
