Killing all processes containing a specific pattern in their process name

Say you want to kill all processes spawned from your Oracle Home. In Linux/Unix there is a nice command that lets you achieve this very easily.

If your Oracle Home is /u01/app/oracleHome then any oracle related process will have oracleHome in it's name. To kill all such processes at once issue the command :

pkill -9 -f oracleHome