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

[Xin LI]

On 2009/12/22 14:54, Jason A. Spiro wrote:
> 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.

killall can be used by scripts which just works in the past, and will 
never notice the warnings.  Also, killall is not "that" dangerous on 
FreeBSD, we should ONLY give warnings when it's really necessary, 
otherwise users would just ignore all warnings we gave to them.

On the other hand, it seems to us that warning messages won't work, no 
matter how long we give it, it is being ignored by a majority of users.

>>   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.

Then users are already familiar with FreeBSD would have to learn what 
"fkill" is, and after all, having them to pay for mistakes made by 
commercial Unix vendors does not seem to be a fair option.

>> 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".

Well, I'd say it's too late for us to change since it's several years 
after we have 'killall' our way.

> 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.

pkill have '-I', at least on FreeBSD...

Cheers,
-- 
Xin LI <delphij at delphij.net>	http://www.delphij.net/
FreeBSD - The Power to Serve!	       Live free or die