Kill command

[Peter Lewis]

On Friday 20 July 2007 at 02:00:49 D. Michael McIntyre wrote:
> On Thursday 19 July 2007, Peter Lewis wrote:
> > Interesting... I hadn't come across this before.
> >
> > Is there a difference between pkill and killall?
>
> NAME
>        pgrep, pkill - look up or signal processes based on name and other
> attributes
>
>
> NAME
>        killall - kill processes by name
>
>
> Though the way I've always used pkill makes it more or less identical to
> killall, I admit.  I've always just said "pkill," probably because I
> learned that Linux verb first.  :)

Yep, same with me... I just learnt killall first. I've heard that killall 
has "different" functionality on other Unices though, so should generally be 
avoided if you don't want a nasty surprise (kill-all, go figure). Since both 
appear to send signals to all processes bearing a given name though, they 
both seem to do the same thing on a modern linux box...

e.g.

pkill -9 konqueror
and
killall -9 konqueror

appear to both behave identically... The optional parameter lists are also 
very similar.

Often with these sorts of commands it's about where they came from (i.e. pkill 
is from Solaris) and they're kept for compatibility. I just wondered if 
anyone knew of a functional difference.

Pete.