The other week I learnt a valuable lesson about pkill, namely that it will match like a greedy little bastard unless instructed not to, which may have unintended consequences…
To illustrate, consider these two images:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
So what happens is I start two processes, foo and foobar (which are simple shell scripts running sleep 1h),
execute pkill foo, and both foo and foobar dies.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Adding -x (or --exact) to the pkill command will ensure that only foo gets killed.
If you want to go overnuking everything, regular pkill will serve you well, but if you are looking for a scalpel, then -x is most definitively what you want.
:wq
