kill processes with name=x && %mem>y

[SeijiSensei]

Just a note that you can kill a process by name, rather than PID, using "killall programname" instead of "kill". As the name implies, though, it kills all processes running programname, which may or may not be what you want to do.

killall takes the same switches as kill; -15 is "graceful," while -9 lowers the boom.

[BkkBonanza]

Killing seems so brutal. Couldn't you just set their niceness so they run at low priority? Or is this some hog user on your system you want to rid yourself of?

man renice

[LightningCrash]

Just a note that you can kill a process by name, rather than PID, using "killall programname" instead of "kill". As the name implies, though, it kills all processes running programname, which may or may not be what you want to do.

killall takes the same switches as kill; -15 is "graceful," while -9 lowers the boom.

I would not advise becoming accustomed to using `killall`, as it has drastically different behaviors on other *nix platforms.

pkill is much preferred.

[slooksterpsv]

I would not advise becoming accustomed to using `killall`, as it has drastically different behaviors on other *nix platforms.

pkill is much preferred.

I haven't made scripts that do killall or kill, but I do use those quite a bit with stuck programs. Why pkill? (googling now).

[LightningCrash]

I haven't made scripts that do killall or kill, but I do use those quite a bit with stuck programs. Why pkill? (googling now).

If you're on a Solaris box and you type

killall firefox

It will kill everything on the machine. Solaris' killall doesn't accept processname arguments.