Kill a Program with pkill
I have a cronjob to open macOS's Photo Booth every weekday so I can take a picture of my work life. Unfortunately, it opens the program every weekday; I'd rather it quickly closes itself if I'm not there or otherwise occupied. Today I used pkill
in the cronjob to terminate the program five minutes after opening:
20 9 * * 1-5 pkill "Photo Booth"
pkill
kills a process by name. You can figure out how to make pkill
effective using pgrep
, a companion program that searches for running processes by name. Using it, I learned that the string "Photo Booth" was specific enough to find and kill Photo Booth:
$ pgrep -l "Photo"
292 Photo Booth
"Photo Booth", PID 292 (today), is the process I programmatically kill every weekday at 9:20 AM.
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