[PLUG] Top is lying

[chris (fool) mccraw]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:01, Rogan Creswick <creswick at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 9:21 AM, chris (fool) mccraw <gently at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> be warned, killall on some unices (ok, i know that aix 3, but i have
>> vague recollections about older solarises) does not do the same thing
>> and will in fact kill all processes running under the userid that runs
>> killall.  doing a 'sudo killall -1 inetd' brought down a server for me
>> once...killing all of root's processes at once turns out to be a bad
>
> Back when I was young and needed the money, I used 'kill -9 -1' to,
> uh, remotely log myself out on occasion.... the -1 pid represents
> every process you own, aside from 'kill'.  That's probably not related
> to your situation, (since -1 is a valid HUP signal) but it *is*
> something to look out for.  Don't get the parameters mixed up, in any
> case :)

kill -9 -1 still works almost as you mention and is documented in the
man page (negative PIDs are process groups, -1 is everydamnthing).
i'd never quite realized that it meant "kill all processes you CAN
kill" so running it as root is the disaster i recounted earlier from
my AIX days.

in the process, i discovered killall5 which is a clone of the tool i
spake of on aix3, which does the equivalent of the above, ie,
specifying a pid of -1 to regular kill.