killing a parent based on the child process name

[Dan Browning (Network Admin)]

I need to be able to kill a parent process based on the child process name.
I can use "ps aux | grep xxx" to find the parent parent process ID - but how
do I get that number out of that line?  I need to pipe that number to kill,
so that the parent is dead and all it's children die.  I tried to pipe it to
cut, but I couldn't get it work every time.   Or maybe there is a command
that reports the parent of a process?  That would be the handiest.

Some more background info:

Thanks to your guys' help, I have a simple script (included below), that
just runs a few programs in a loop for me.  But the parent of the process
is -bash.  The problem is when I want to stop the mirror program.  Of course
I can't just "killall mirror" because the shell will just start another one
(because of the loop).  Now, because the parent is bash, then I would have
to kill all bash processes (assuming I don't know which bash started my
"mirror"s) to get the child processes (mirror) to stop.

Is there a command that will return the name of the parent of a given
process?  Then I could pipe that to killall.

Here is the contents of the file newmirrormandrake.sh
----------------------------
M=/home/danb/mirror/mirror.mandrake

while true
do
        mirror -pMandrake       $M
        mirror -papps           $M
        mirror -pdoc            $M
        mirror -pdosutils       $M
        mirror -pimages                 $M
        mirror -pmisc           $M
done
----------------------------

TIA.


Dan Browning
Network Administrator
Cyclone Computer Systems