Pkill is a project mainly written in Python, it's free.
Terminate processes/programs by their name, not their pid!
PKILL
by Colin Woodbury
Don't feel like fiddling around with grep and kill to stop that runaway process that isn't acting the way it should? With pkill, you can kill it by name!
pkill iTunes # Bye bye iTunes! pkill Firefox # Bye bye Firefox!
Need more power? Force the kill!
pkill -9 Firefox # Someone was being a bad boy.
pkill accepts all the numbered signals that the native 'kill' command does.
pkill is a python script that is compatible from 2.6 upwards through 3.2. To run it, you'll need to be using Linux, OSX, or Cygwin in Windows.
cygwin: http://cygwin.com/
Download the source, and place it whereever you like. Then, in either your .bash_profile (mac) or .bashrc (Linux), add something like:
alias pkill="python ~/path/to/pkill/pkill.py"
Save, and close the Terminal window, and open a new one. You're ready to use pkill!
No matter where you are in your shell, just type:
pkill (optional-term-signal) name-of-naughty-process
and all will be taken care of!