How can I kill a process from Terminal using the visible window name?

Question

This question is similar in spirit to How can I kill a process by its name?, but not a duplicate for the reason below.

As an example, here's how IntelliJ appears in Activity Monitor:

The name is "IntelliJ IDEA". This is also the name visible when you toggle windows. However ps aux will show the process name as idea because that's the name of the process being executed:

/Applications/IntelliJ IDEA.app/Contents/MacOS/idea

Typing pkill -i intellij does nothing, as you have to type pkill -i idea to actually kill the right process. But is there a way to do this without having to lookup the right process name first? I'd like to type in kill_by_visible_name intellij and see the process terminated.

One option is to run ps aux | grep -i intellij but this will also find processes that happen to run from a folder named "IntelliJ", not just the actual IntelliJ process. This will also fail for processes where the visible name is not the same as the name of the application folder. Another option is to lookup the PID within Activity Monitor, but this is time consuming when you already know the name of the application.

Answer 1

Figured out this is possible using lsappinfo:

#!/bin/bash
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
      echo "Please provide a process name"
      exit
fi
apps_list=$(lsappinfo)
found_line_numbers=$(echo "$apps_list"  | grep -nE '([0-9]+\) "[a-zA-Z ]+")' | grep -i "$1" | awk '{print $1}' FS=":")
if [ -z "$found_line_numbers" ]
then
      echo "Process named $1 not found"
else
      while IFS= read -r line; do
        line_pid=$(echo "$apps_list" | tail -n +$line | head -n 5 | grep pid | awk -F ' ' '{print $3}')
        echo "Trying to kill process $line_pid"
        kill -9 "$line_pid"
      done <<< "$found_line_numbers"
fi

The grep/awk combo is a bit awkward, but I couldn't find a better to extract the PID from lsappinfo.