Suggestion: rename "killall" to "fkill", but wait five years to phase the new name in

[Craig Small]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 01:31:02AM -0500, Jason A. Spiro wrote:
> Naming it the same as System V killall, which just kills all
> processes, can wreak havoc.  When someone types a standard Linux
> killall command line as root on a Solaris or HP-UX server, System V
> killall runs and kills all processes.
Hello Jason (and the FreeBSD folk),

The problem for me is that killall in Linux has been called that for a
very long time now. psmisc came out 11 years ago and before that killall
was in procps. I'm not sure when but the copyright message says 1994.

That's 16 years or more of people getting very used to killall doing
what it does and being called killall.  I know of the problem you refer
to having administered Solaris servers before, but changing the name now
will cause more problems than it solves.

> Craig, and hackers, are you both willing to do this?
I'm not. Even though I just got a new SATA drive its not big enough to
handle the torrent of emails from people saying "why did i do that" and
"who cares about Solaris" etc etc if I did change it.

Sounds like its a no from FreeBSD folk too.  In fact to me its more
important my various programs look the same(ish) across the Linux
distributions and to FreeBSD than they are to Solaris.

I also agree with Daniel; why would anyone want to literally kill every
process?

 - Craig

-- 
Craig Small      GnuPG:1C1B D893 1418 2AF4 45EE  95CB C76C E5AC 12CA DFA5
http://www.enc.com.au/                             csmall at : enc.com.au
http://www.debian.org/          Debian GNU/Linux, software should be Free