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Date:      Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:54:46 -0500
From:      "Jason A. Spiro" <jasonspiro4@gmail.com>
To:        Xin LI <delphij@gmail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Suggestion: rename "killall" to "fkill", but wait five years to  phase the new name in
Message-ID:  <c241693f0912221454o1a6bd54v7e1d7afb2694a9e2@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <a78074950912221434i36be337co7ee1f9ad6bb5c921@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <c241693f0912212231g5c380246kf12f7bde974bb734@mail.gmail.com>  <alpine.BSF.2.00.0912221409400.21806@qvfongpu.5c.ybpny> <loom.20091222T230421-82@post.gmane.org>  <a78074950912221434i36be337co7ee1f9ad6bb5c921@mail.gmail.com>

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Hi Xin,

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 5:34 PM, Xin LI <delphij@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm afraid that it's too late to change either parties, i.e. there
> would be a lot of scripts that rely on the BSD or Linux behavior, etc.

That is why I suggested that you first show a warning message for five
years, then do the renaming.

> =A0Instead of making changes to killall which already diverge between
> open source implementation and closed source ones,

If you rename the open source killall to "fkill", then you will no
longer have a killall command which differs between open source and
closed source.

> it might be better
> off to have administrators to learn some more consistent ways to do
> the same task, i.e. pkill.

It would be good if sysadmins learned not to use killall.  But I think
that most sysadmins who are already used to killall are unlikely to
learn not to type the command "killall" unless you rename open-source
killall to a different name like "fkill".

I think it's impractical to expect all sysadmins to switch to pkill.
Pkill is missing the option which displays a list onscreen of which
processes were killed.  I sent a feature request to the maintainer,
but there is no guarantee that the maintainer will add that option.
And maybe there are other pkill options which are missing from skill.

Cheers,
-Jason



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