Your message dated Fri, 29 May 2020 11:24:33 +1000 with message-id <caly8cw7fqlz46awh2kc-oswb4uaundvnyo-1xozonenn5jk...@mail.gmail.com> and subject line Re: Bug#961761: psmisc: killall fails to kill processes with names longer than 15 characters has caused the Debian Bug report #961761, regarding psmisc: killall fails to kill processes with names longer than 15 characters to be marked as done.
This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with. If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith. (NB: If you are a system administrator and have no idea what this message is talking about, this may indicate a serious mail system misconfiguration somewhere. Please contact [email protected] immediately.) -- 961761: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=961761 Debian Bug Tracking System Contact [email protected] with problems
--- Begin Message ---Package: psmisc Version: 23.2-1 Severity: serious killall fails to kill processes with names longer than 15 characters. According to the manpage: -e, --exact Require an exact match for very long names. If a command name is longer than 15 characters, the full name may be unavailable (i.e. it is swapped out). In this case, killall will kill everything that matches within the first 15 characters. With -e, such entries are skipped. [...] So without "-e" it should kill everything that matches within the first 15 characters. That was apparently the behaviour in previous versions, but that's broken now. To reproduce: (echo "#!/bin/sh"; echo "while true; do sleep 1; echo 'Still running!'; done") > killall-bug-with-long-names-demo chmod 755 killall-bug-with-long-names-demo ./killall-bug-with-long-names-demo & killall killall-bug-with-long-names-demo I think that's at least "serious", because it makes killall by name basically unusable, at least in automated contexts, unless you want to replace: killall "$x" everywhere with some beast such as (untested): killall "$(echo "$x" | cut -c-15)" It could even have more adverse consequences if you rely on a script killing some process with killall, which has worked before and breaks now, especially if this process continues to waste resources or give access to privileges you meant to stop etc. (That's almost what happened to me when I found the problem, though in my case the worst thing it caused, fortunately, was blocking a network port.) In the worst case, this could be security-critical. (Not sure if this justifies "grave"!?) Sure, you may say one should check the status of each command, including killall, but that's hard to do when the status is the same (1) as in the case when the program isn't running at all, so one would have to check with something like pidof before (which does still find long program names), worry about race-conditions etc. -- System Information: Debian Release: 10.3 APT prefers stable-updates APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-debug'), (500, 'proposed-updates-debug'), (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.14.0-0.bpo.3-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores) Kernel taint flags: TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE, TAINT_OOT_MODULE Locale: LANG=de_DE, LC_CTYPE=de_DE (charmap=ISO-8859-1), LANGUAGE=de_DE (charmap=ISO-8859-1) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages psmisc depends on: ii libc6 2.28-10 ii libselinux1 2.8-1+b1 ii libtinfo6 6.1+20181013-2+deb10u2 psmisc recommends no packages. psmisc suggests no packages. -- debconf-show failed
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--- Begin Message ---On Fri, 29 May 2020 at 09:21, Frank Heckenbach <[email protected]> wrote: > killall fails to kill processes with names longer than 15 > characters. Actually it does. But the comm length has increased for some kernels. If you're asking it to kill something with another name because the comm is "killall-bug-wit" not "killall-bug-with-long-names" it used to work even though the command is wrong because it just cut the extra characters off. This won't work when the comm length is increased. $ ps -o comm 1739632 COMMAND killall-bug-wit $ killall killall-bug-wit However 23.3 has a work-around where if the comm length is exactly 15 characters then it matches on this too. This is a duplicate of bug #912748 and fixed in psmisc 23.3-1 - Craig
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