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

[Alexey Dokuchaev]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2004 at 03:51:22PM -0800, Julian Elischer wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, 24 Mar 2004, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> 
> > 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.

I've been using alias "psg = ps auxlww | grep" for pretty much the same
purpose.  Is there some very strong reasoning behind bringing in some
new facility?

> > 
> >    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.
> 
> 
> so pkill is like killall but miore flexible?
> 
> how about you make killall a special case of pkill so we don't have the
> duplication..

Seconded here.  Frankly, I tend to go against populating base system
with utilities of not so strict orthogonality.

./danfe