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Basically I want to dynamically start some processes which may create their own children processes, also I want to kill a certain group of processes I just created whenever I want. One way I could think of is to start processes with a name(to distinguish as a group), then use pkill to kill them by the name. The question is how to start a process with a name so that I can use pkill to kill them by the name? I am open to other solutions as well.

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How can I start a process with a different name?

bash -c "exec -a <MyProcessName> <Command>"

Then you can kill the process with:

pkill -f MyProcessName

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user2829759
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    I'm trying this with nodejs and it doesn't work, process name is always `node`. I'm using this `exec -a myprocess node server.js`. I can't get anything by using `pidof myprocess` and `pgrep myprocess`. However when I try to find the name of the process by the process ID I get `node` – 11thdimension Jun 28 '17 at 19:58
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    The same problem. -a does not set the name. no error but nor name. – Čamo Feb 23 '21 at 22:10