One of the singularly best things about Unix / Linux is that even after using it for literally years, there is always a new thing to learn. The best way to learn something is to just get frustrated and then google. There is always a different way to do it – sometimes it is simple i.e. better and sometimes it might be really hard but there is always a different way.

The problem I had the other day was I kept hitting open file handle limits. I'm not sure why but when this happens it is generally reboot time and I hate reboot time so anything I can do to keep my box alive long enough to get the job done makes me just a bit less cranky. In this case I had a strikingly large number of terminal windows open and I needed to get them shut down.

Activity Monitor wasn't helpful and the only thing that was responsive was a sole instance of the Node JS based HyperTerm. And, oddly enough, that was the one bit of my system which was responsive. I knew that I could do ps auwwx

grep iTerm but, well, that would just suck:

A quick google for kill process by name led me here and it was a great illustration of the swiss army knife nature of Unix. Options ranged from pkill to killall to shell one liners. pkill, while risky, worked great:

Risky

pkill is a pattern matching tool so if you're not careful it will take out anything that matches. Here's a pkill man page and use with care but I surely like it.