Re: pkill and pgrep: reality check

Emanuele Rusconi <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.lfs.general
Message-ID <CAPife4nUrCU3X9=sjZWiZWMMYhPjw0qKN+W5mcwQFsqp8VHFAA@mail.gmail.com>
On 9 February 2015 at 18:29, Walter Webb <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> While investigating some odd behavior of pkill(1), I discovered
> that pkill and pgrep match any name that has the argument as a
> substring.
>
>    pgrep e
>
>         outputs a long list of pid's.
>
>    pgrep ""
>
>         outputs all pid's.
>
> I tried pgrep on the oldest distribution I had still running,
> Slackware-11.0 (according to Wikipedia, released 2006-10-02).
> The result was the same.  It seems too old to be a bug; but
> the man page is buggy for not giving a big fat WARNING.
> Or am I the only user of pkill?


How is this unexpected behaviour?? It's perfectly consistent with
grep's behaviour.

If you read the man page, you'll find that you can use the "-x" option
to exactly match the name.

--
Emanuele
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