Re: pgrep and pkill

[David Krause <openbsd@davidkrause.com>]

Sweet, I've always wanted this program because it's so useful on
Solaris.  It seems to work pretty well on my OpenBSD 2.8 box.
However, on my -current box it fails, probably because of changes with
in kmem.  It just gives a bunch of totally incorrect values.  Maybe
someone can audit this once it is fixed for -current and get it into
the tree?

David

* Bitt Faulk <wfaulk@beaglebros.com> [010518 13:11]:
> Solaris provides a couple of handy utilities called pgrep and pkill
> that, repectively, search for and kill processes that match arguments
> given to the process.  The arguments can include things like a regex
> to match the running process name, ppid, euid, etc.  I was looking for
> this for OpenBSD, and the closest thing I could find was zap in the
> ports tree, but it just parses the output of ps with sed and stuff, and
> this is not what I wanted.
> 
> So I took it upon myself to implement pgrep and pkill for OpenBSD.  It
> uses the same reads of kernel memory that ps does, so it should be much
> faster than zap.  I haven't gotten to pkill yet, but it should be done
> tonight, hopefully.  Anyone who's interested please take a look at
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/proctools and let me know what you
> think.
> 
> Of course, I'm sure that I'll now get a dozen responses that say ``this
> already exists, moron'', but at least I'll know about it then.
> 
> -Bitt
> 
> PS: The reason zap was not the right thing was that I have an
> underpowered OpenBSD machine that was getting wedged to to a cron domino
> effect, and those extra processes zap forks were taking way too long.