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

[Brian Murray]

I've uploaded this to the queue for review by the SRU team.

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

Title:
  killall with 65 arguments kills more than expected

Status in psmisc package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in psmisc source package in Precise:
  In Progress

Bug description:
  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.

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