Adding `pgrep' and `pkill' to /usr/bin

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 4:11 PM -0500 3/24/04, John Baldwin wrote:
>On Wednesday 24 March 2004, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>  > I noticed the upcoming version of OpenBSD will add the commands
>>  `pkill' and `pgrep', which they picked up from NetBSD.  These
>>  commands also exist in Solaris and Linux.  Anyone mind if I add
>>  them to FreeBSD?  I'd just pick up the versions from NetBSD, and
>  > make whatever changes are needed for them to work on FreeBSD.
>
>What do they do?

Oh.  Yeah, it might help if I said something about that...

The short answer:

   The `pgrep' command searches the process table on the running system
and prints the process IDs of all processes that match the criteria
given on the command line.  Criteria includes matching against the
process-name, or matching against the full-argument list of the
processes.

   The `pkill' command searches the process table on the running
system and signals all processes that match the criteria given on
the command line.

   Note that a running `pgrep' or `pkill' process will never consider
itself nor system processes (kernel threads) as a potential match.

The more complete answer:
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=pkill&sektion=1

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu