[Bug 1507681] [NEW] killall with 65 arguments kills more than expected

Gregory Boyce gregory.boyce at gmail.com
Mon Oct 19 16:41:34 UTC 2015


Public bug reported:

killall in Precise is supposed to limit the number of arguments to 64,
but due to a fencepost error, 66 arguments will be blocked but 65 is
not.

With 65 arguments, the behavior varies, but in some cases will send a
signal to random processes.

# ps xa | wc -l
164

# mkdir ~/tmp_tasks/
# for i in `seq 1 65`; do touch ~/tmp_tasks/test$i; done;

# for i in `seq 1 65`; do echo ~/tmp_tasks/test$i; done  | xargs killall
Connection to 198.18.88.176 closed by remote host.
Connection to 198.18.88.176 closed.

# ps xa | wc -l
126

This is fixed upstream and at the very least trusty works fine.

** Affects: psmisc (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1507681

Title:
  killall with 65 arguments kills more than expected

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