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

[David Laight <david%l8s.co.uk@localhost>]

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!

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.

        David

-- 
David Laight: david%l8s.co.uk@localhost