Awk xargs kill, illegal pid what's wrong?

I have the following code. On cygwin I get the following erros:

$ torak
kill: illegal pid: User
kill: illegal pid: cons0
kill: illegal pid: 05:12:32
kill: illegal pid: /cygdrive/s/_flash/Motion-Twin/neko/neko

alias torak="ps -ef | awk '/cygdrive\/s\/_flash\/Motion\-Twin\/neko\/neko/{print $2}' | xargs kill"

What is the problem?

What happens if you run the command without the final pipe into xargs by hand?

Maybe it's a line termination problem, you could try xargs -0

Just a guess.

@Doug It may be but i dont replacing it with null characters would be relevant in this case.

The output of the awk is:



Executing echo "6712" | xargs kill works

The output of:

echo "hello world" | awk '/hello/{print $1}' is

I may have it. It's down to it being an alias - when you define it the variable $2 does not contain a value, so the alias value is invalid. Quote the $ (\$) to prevent it being evaluated at creation time and try that.
<edit>
Yes, that worked for me Use alias -p to see what is defined
</edit>