Use pkill to kill processes based on their name. For example to terminate all instances of mplayer:


# pkill mplayer
    

Let's assume that you have a directory "test" containing the following files:  [root@blackmod test]# ls -la
total 8
drwxr-xr-x.  2 root root 4096 2010-03-10 06:11 .
dr-xr-x---. 11 root root 4096 20 [ ... ]