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

[Jason A. Spiro]

Hi Xin,

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 5:34 PM, Xin LI <delphij at 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.

>  Instead 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