This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

Unix, Xenix and ODT General FAQ

Killall doesn't work!

Well, actually it does- it's just a very different command than what you might think.

Solaris, Linux and Bsd users are accustomed to using killall to kill processes by name. SCO (and old Sunos too) use killall quite differently. They use it as part of shutdown to kill off stuff before shutting down. Here's what happens with SCO if you type "killall mozilla-bin" as root. (thanks to Bela Lubkin for some enlightenment here):

"mozilla-bin" gets converted to a number. Fortunately, that's 0, because "killall" then builds a list of processes and sends them a signal 0. Signal 0 does nothing, so no harm done in this case. But if we had said "killall 9lives" instead, it would have sent a signal 9 to just about everything running. That could upset a few people.

See "man killall" for the gory details. Try "killall -v mozilla-bin" if you like - but don't try "9lives" unless you don't care what gets killed (the -v shows the processes affected).

John Dubois's "maim" program is similar to Linux/Bsd killall:

ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/scripts/maim

Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal

Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon

Take Control of Screen Sharing in Leopard

Take Control of Permissions in Leopard

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