Re: CVS commit: src/usr.bin/pkill

[christos%astron.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

In article <20121121200309.GN508%snowdrop.l8s.co.uk@localhost>,
David Laight  <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost> wrote:
>On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 12:43:20PM -0500, Christos Zoulas wrote:
>> On Nov 22,  4:39am, mrg%eterna.com.au@localhost (matthew green) wrote:
>> -- Subject: re: CVS commit: src/usr.bin/pkill
>> 
>> | this seems like a fairly big semantic change to me.
>> | 
>> | could you change it to take a new option to look in argv[0] instead
>> | of p_comm?  p_comm is not changeable by the user.
>> 
>> You could already do this with -f. The point was to make the default case
>> behave intuitively. Adding an option is against that. I could add backwards
>> compatibility by checking both, but I think that in the long term this will
>> be dangerous and confusing (since you might end up killing more than you
>> thought you would...)
>
>That (killing too much) is always true when you use something like pkill().
>At least it is better that the 'ps | grep' I've seen many people do!

Yes, this is why it is best to not use things that kill by name from scripts.

>Is pkill() guaranteed to do an atomic traversal of the process list?
>So it will kill something that keeps using fork() to change its pid.

I don't think our libkvm offers that.

christos