[procps] Re: skill command does not work in debian 7 releases

  • From: Paweł Gołaszewski <pawelg@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: procps@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 08:05:40 +0100

W dniu 2015-01-24 o 07:23, Craig Small pisze:
Hi Pawel,
   Half of your bug report is fixed.

First the good news. Commit 7610b31 has just been pushed which means
that skill command lines that include signals are interpreted correctly.

The bad news is that you will need to specify what sort of thing you
are filtering on. I cannot recall why this changed but I believe it is
to do with problems of killing things without being specific about it;
some people have odd usernames.

In other words "skill -9 -t pts/0" will now work but
"skill -9 pts/0" will not.

skill is a very old program and was flagged obsolete back
in 2006. pkill is the preferred tool for this sort of thing.

  - Craig

Hi Craig,

Thank you for your efforts. I was usually filtering on terminal name. As you wrote that command skill is obsolete I looked at the man page of skill and I found out that there is new command pkill which works pretty same way. 'pkill -9 -t pts/0' does what 'skill -9 pts/0 was doing. I assume that command skill as a default was searching at command line arguments for terminal name. I'm using sometimes this command to avoid writing bash command history while leaving terminal session.

KR
Paweł



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