[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#258420: Proposal for fixing

[Thomas Hood]

HMH wrote:
> ^portmap$
> ^rpc\.

I just looked at killall5.c and it shouldn't be too hard to implement a feature
whereby a given list of process names or numbers is excluded.  So let's talk
about the semantics for the new operand list.

1.    killall5 [[-]SIGNUM] [NAME]...

2.    killall5 [[-]SIGNUM] [-n NAME]...

3.    killall5 [[-]SIGNUM] [-n NAME...]...

4.    killall5 [[-]SIGNUM] [PID]...

5.    killall5 [[-]SIGNUM] [-p PID]...

6.    killall5 [[-]SIGNUM] [-p PID...]...

7.    killall5 [[-]SIGNUM] [-n NAME|-p PID]...

8.    killall5 [[-]SIGNUM] [-n NAME...|-p PID...]...

Question: Should the program accept process names or pids?    killall5 is the
same program is pidof, so the resources of pidof are available internally; so it
wouldn't be hard to accept names.  However, accepting pids would give the user
more control and she can easily do "killall5 $(pidof NAME)".  Accepting either
names or pids would save us from having to decide, but would rule out (1) and (4)
since integers are valid as program names.

Question: Can we just accept the list as additional non-option arguments, or do
you think we have to implement this as an option?

Question: Are (3), (6) and (8) reasonable?  That is, a single "-p" followed by
multiple space-separated PIDs?  Or do you find that too non-standard?
-- 
Thomas Hood