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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? The Language of the Unix World should Change Post 302378548 by tonank on Tuesday 8th of December 2009 06:28:22 AM
Old 12-08-2009
The Language of the Unix World should Change

We should put an end to saying "orphan", "kill child", "zombie".

Anyone,

We should change the awful metaphors used in the language of managing Unix processes. I believe that this still humbly local initiative hides a great importance of how the world of Unix looks and feels to every user.


Example:
No more "kill". Use stop, remove or whatever else. It doesn't matter if that's already taken, we will always have vast language reserves.

If a process can be called a child/parrent then it should not be "killed" and "reaped", but collected. I prefer the playground to the graveyard, don't know about you.

Think about the already present "forest" metaphor. We could have roots an branches again. Or to seas, flows and rivers. Or flocks and packs. Or kings, counts, servants and agents. If we could "dam", "stem", "draw", why should we kill?

Since this is standard, it can change. One shouldn't think about how great a challenge it, one should just start walking against it.


You might feel this is irrelevant to what is actually done with a computer system and what it's for. But it's a fact that metaphors are used in illustrations of knowledge as well as in making the world we live and work in ours. If we care for what we wear and what you have in the house, why shouldn't you care of the words and ideas with which you express what you are doing?


I start today by creating links/aliases for the commands I don't like to hear on each of the 50 or so real and virtual machines I set foot on.
 

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TKILL(1)							     LAM TOOLS								  TKILL(1)

NAME
tkill - Terminate LAM on one node. SYNOPSIS
tkill [-dhvN] [-f killfile] OPTIONS
-d Turn on debugging mode. This implies -v. -h Print the command help menu. -v Be verbose. -N Pretend; do not take action. -f killfile Use killfile as the name of the kill file. DESCRIPTION
The tkill tool terminates the LAM session started by hboot(1) on the local node. tkill makes use of a kill file created by the LAM kernel, which contains the process identifiers of every LAM process in ASCII format. A SIGHUP (see signal(3)) signal is sent to every process listed in the kill file. tkill waits a short period of time for each process to die. By adding the debug option, the user can see the final disposition of each process. The mission is accomplished if all processes end up dead. In LAM, the first process to be killed is always the kernel. When the kernel receives its termination signal, it propagates the signal to all of its constituent processes. Therefore, tkill will ordinarily be racing the kernel to kill all other processes. This redundant aspect of tkill allows it to be used as a general purpose tool in association with hboot(1). FILES
/tmp/lam-$USER@hostname the kill file, created by the kernel, where $USER is the userid, and hostname is the name of the local machine SEE ALSO
hboot(1), lam-helpfile(5) LAM 7.1.4 July, 2007 TKILL(1)
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