alias for killing all processes of a grep hit [duplicate]

Question

I am trying to make a superkill alias that kills all process that hit a grep match. I'd like to do:

superkill ruby

And have it kill all processes that match 'ruby'

In my .bashrc, I've added this

alias superkill="ps ax | grep $1 | cut -f1 -d' ' | xargs kill"

However, when I run it, I get

superkill something
usage: grep [-abcDEFGHhIiJLlmnOoqRSsUVvwxZ] [-A num] [-B num] [-C[num]]
    [-e pattern] [-f file] [--binary-files=value] [--color=when]
...

Can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks, Kevin

---

This is different than the duplicate. I am asking a specific question. The duplicate is a high level question that speaks in generalities. I am unable to come up with a solution after reading the duplicate.

pkill -f does not work. if you do

ps -A|grep ruby

and then

pkill -f ruby

and then

ps -A|grep ruby

You will see that a ruby processes still exist. BUT if you do

kill -9 xxx

where xxx is the PID, this does work. What I'm looking for is something that aliases kill -9 to the matches to grep.

UPDATE - this reminds me of my frustration with SO, where everyone is too quick to downvote or flag (i contend that flagging has very little value). Here's yet another example where all of the suggested answers do not work:

kevin@kpi-2:~/Documents/code/kpi-veh$ sudo killall -r ruby
kevin@kpi-2:~/Documents/code/kpi-veh$ ps -A|grep ruby
27175 pts/9    00:22:03 ruby
kevin@kpi-2:~/Documents/code/kpi-veh$ sudo killall -r ruby
kevin@kpi-2:~/Documents/code/kpi-veh$ ps -A|grep ruby
27175 pts/9    00:22:06 ruby
kevin@kpi-2:~/Documents/code/kpi-veh$ sudo killall -r ruby
kevin@kpi-2:~/Documents/code/kpi-veh$ ps -A|grep ruby
27175 pts/9    00:22:08 ruby
kevin@kpi-2:~/Documents/code/kpi-veh$ kill -9 27175
kevin@kpi-2:~/Documents/code/kpi-veh$

what i am looking for (cannot believe i still have to argue with the hall monitors that this is a dupe) is a way to alias kill. In this case (this happens often with Ruby), I HAVE to resort to killing the process by ID, killall in any variant does not work, as best I can tell.

Answer 1

What you're looking for already exists, by the name killall -r:

killall sends a signal to all processes running any of the specified commands. If no signal name is specified, SIGTERM is sent. [...]

-r, --regexp

Interpret process name pattern as an extended regular expression.

(killall(1) manual page)

Answer 2

You can't use positional parameters with an alias.
The command you are running with that alias is:

ps ax | grep | cut -f1 -d' ' | xargs kill something

You need to make this a function.

Much longer than your code but here is a similar function I use:

smash () {
    local T_PROC=$1
    local T_PIDS=($(pgrep -i "$T_PROC"))
    if [[ "${#T_PIDS[@]}" -ge 1 ]]; then
        echo "Found the following processes:"
        for pid in "${T_PIDS[@]}"; do
            echo "$pid" "$(ps -p "$pid" -o comm= | awk -F'/' '{print $NF}')" | column -t
        done
        if ( yorn.ask "Kill them?" ); then
            for pid in "${T_PIDS[@]}"; do
                echo "Killing ${pid}..."
                ( kill -15 "$pid" ) && continue
                sleep 2
                ( kill -2 "$pid" ) && continue
                sleep 2
                ( kill -1 "$pid" ) && continue
                echo "What the hell is this thing?" >&2 && return 1
            done
        else
            echo "Exiting..."
            return 0
        fi
    else
        echo "No processes found for: $1" >&2 && return 1
    fi
}

yorn.ask is a separate function I use:

yorn.ask () {
    read -p "$@ [Y/n]: " RESP && local YORN_RESP="$(echo "${RESP:0:1}" | grep -i "[YN]")"
    while [[ -z "$YORN_RESP" ]]; do
        echo "Please respond only with: y or n"
        read -p "$@ [Y/n]: " RESP && local YORN_RESP="$(echo "${RESP:0:1}" | grep -i "[YN]")"
    done
    [[ "$YORN_RESP" == 'Y' || "$YORN_RESP" == 'y' ]] && return 0 || return 1
}