I recently started using CentOS.  I went to try to use the killall utility but found it missing, with me receiving a command not found message when trying to use it.  How can I get this functionality on my system so that I can, for instance, kill all processes whose names match a pattern?
CentOS - killall command (to kill all processes with names matching a given pattern)
centos
The pkill utility is a much better alternative to killall. killall is not portable as the behavior of the command is very different across OSs. pkill is portable and behaves the same everywhere. It's also a lot more flexible as it provides a lot of different ways of matching the processes. It also shares the same matching behavior and arguments as the pgrep utility, which allows you to see what processes would be matched and signaled without actually signalling them.