In article <[email protected]>, David Laight <[email protected]> wrote: >On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 12:43:20PM -0500, Christos Zoulas wrote: >> On Nov 22, 4:39am, [email protected] (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
