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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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KILLALL(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 						KILLALL(1)

NAME
killall -- kill processes by name SYNOPSIS
killall [-delmsvz] [-help] [-u user] [-t tty] [-c procname] [-SIGNAL] [procname ...] DESCRIPTION
The killall utility kills processes selected by name, as opposed to the selection by pid as done by kill(1). By default, it will send a TERM signal to all processes with a real UID identical to the caller of killall that match the name procname. The super-user is allowed to kill any process. The options are as follows: -d | -v Be more verbose about what will be done. For a single -d option, a list of the processes that will be sent the signal will be printed, or a message indicating that no matching processes have been found. -e Use the effective user ID instead of the (default) real user ID for matching processes specified with the -u option. -help Give a help on the command usage and exit. -l List the names of the available signals and exit, like in kill(1). -m Match the argument procname as a (case sensitive) regular expression against the names of processes found. CAUTION! This is dangerous, a single dot will match any process running under the real UID of the caller. -s Show only what would be done, but do not send any signal. -SIGNAL Send a different signal instead of the default TERM. The signal may be specified either as a name (with or without a lead- ing SIG), or numerically. -u user Limit potentially matching processes to those belonging to the specified user. -t tty Limit potentially matching processes to those running on the specified tty. -c procname When used with the -u or -t flags, limit potentially matching processes to those matching the specified procname. -z Do not skip zombies. This should not have any effect except to print a few error messages if there are zombie processes that match the specified pattern. ALL PROCESSES
Sending a signal to all processes with uid XYZ is already supported by kill(1). So use kill(1) for this job (e.g. $ kill -TERM -1 or as root $ echo kill -TERM -1 | su -m <user>) EXIT STATUS
The killall command will respond with a short usage message and exit with a status of 2 in case of a command error. A status of 1 will be returned if either no matching process has been found or not all processes have been signalled successfully. Otherwise, a status of 0 will be returned. DIAGNOSTICS
Diagnostic messages will only be printed if requested by -d options. SEE ALSO
kill(1), sysctl(3) HISTORY
The killall command appeared in FreeBSD 2.1. It has been modeled after the killall command as available on other platforms. AUTHORS
The killall program was originally written in Perl and was contributed by Wolfram Schneider, this manual page has been written by Jorg Wunsch. The current version of killall was rewritten in C by Peter Wemm using sysctl(3). BSD
January 26, 2004 BSD
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