bash: killall: command not found — A solution

On some systems like the JeOS version of Ubuntu, some commands that we consider trivial are not installed and usually there is an alternative that we are not aware of (e.g instead of nano there is vi).
In this case there is the pkill command that will send a specified signal (or SIGTERM if not specified) to all processes that match the name (more options are available).
For example instead of

killall badProcess

you can use

pkill badProcess

which is also pretty easy and straightforward.

Another solution,

would be of course to install it. If you have enough access you can install the package psmisc using the following command (in Ubuntu / Debian):

apt-get install psmisc

For RHEL – Red Hat / Fedora:

yum install psmisc

This package contains the following useful programs:

• fuser – identifies what processes are using files.
• killall – kills a process by its name, similar to a pkill Unices.
• pstree – Shows currently running processes in a tree format.
• peekfd – Peek at file descriptors of running processes.