On 2011-06-11 23.07, STeve Andre' wrote:
>> NetBSD has that since March 2005 (committed by sketch@).
>> FreeBSD copied it from NetBSD a few days later.
>> procps.cvs.sourceforge.net (used e.g. in Debian) does not have -i.
>> OpenSolaris does not have -i.
>>
>> So I'd say we shouldn't add it.
>>
>> It is not terribly useful; hopefully, you at least know
>> how the processes you are searching for are called.
>> Even if not, you can use ps ax | grep -i to find out,
>> then use the exact name you found for pkill.
>> Personally, i never felt a need for pkill -i,
>> although i'm using pkill a lot.
>> It is not universal, so it is likely to degrade interoperability.
>>
> Hmmm. Two of (arguably) the four best known BSD distributions have it.
> The idea of -i meaning case insensitivity is there already in other (1)
> commands, so I'd say it makes sense to add.
>
> From a practical standpoint, I'm all for it. I've missed killing things
> because of this.
Me personally, I'm scared as hell using pkill at all. I've never been
concerned with not killing *enough*, it's almost always that I'm afraid
I'm killing too *much*...
That said, there is merit in adding -i since it is quite consistently
used in many places, so I say go for it unless it collides with a
switch in some other major *nix (of which I can't think of any right
now).
But it's really not a biggie in my opinion and I fully recognize Ingo's
standpoint as valid as well although I have a hard time seeing it being
seriously used in portable scripts, which would make the interoperability
argument a bit moot.
If I look at myself I'd probably never use it in pkill but perhaps
occasionally in pgrep.
Regards,
/Benny
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