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

[Jason Spiro]

Xin LI <delphij <at> delphij.net> writes:

> killall can be used by scripts which just works in the past, and will 
> never notice the warnings.

On what scripts will nobody notice the warnings?  For example, AFAIK, cron job
output is always mailed to root.  The only scripts I can think of are scripts
called by web applications like PHP, and I can't think of any concrete case
where they would run killall.

> 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.

Good points.

> 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.

As I wrote elsewhere[1] in this thread, it seems to me the commercial vendors
made no mistakes here; only Linux and FreeBSD made mistakes.

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

I replied to this in the last paragraph of text in [1].

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

There is no such option in pkill on Linux.[2]

^  [1].  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.freebsd.devel.hackers/38308/focus=38332
^  [2].  http://linux.die.net/man/1/pkill