Restarting specific process id

Several times a day gnome-shell will crash and need to be restarted, normally I go into a virtual console and type:

ps -ef | grep gnome-shell

and see results like:

mdeimel 23496 2008 14 09:43 ? 00:00:01 /usr/bin/gnome-shell

mdeimel 23509 1 0 09:43 ? 00:00:00 /usr/libexec/gnome-shell-calendar-server

mdeimel 23522 20953 0 09:43 pts/1 00:00:00 grep --color=auto -i gnome-shell

then I type:

kill -1 23496

in order to kill and restart the service (the '-1' parameter calls a restart of the same process)

In an attempt to speed-up this process I created an alias to handle everything at once. Instead of using the "ps" command I started using "pidof" to get the exact process id right away, and pass that into the kill command:

kill -1 `pidof gnome-shell`

and to save as an alias in ~/.bashrc I have

#Restart gnome

alias gnome="kill -1 `pidof gnome-shell`"