[plug] xkill

[Craig Ringer]

On Mon, 2004-04-12 at 13:11, James Devenish wrote:
> In message <1081745972.1642.2.camel at syngery>
> on Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 12:59:32PM +0800, Chris Caston wrote:
> > I'm just playing around with xkill and it seems a good app to put on
> > peoples desktops so that they don't have to resort to pulling up an
> > xterm and using ps aux | grep appname
> 
> FYI you usually get neater output by using the Solaris-style `pgrep -lf
> appname` or `ps -C appname` (or pkill, etc, depending on what it is that
> you know about the state of the system).

Unfortunately, this doesn't work with KDE apps. For some irritating
reason, they _all_ run with the process name 'kdeinit':

[craig]$ pgrep kdeinit
12260
12263
12265
12268
12278
12280
12283
12284
12286
12288
12291
12293
12300
12418
12758
13047
[craig]$ pgrep kdesktop
[craig]$

Otherwise, I tend to agree with you - pgrep and pkill are much cleaner.
I have, unfortunately, found that 'pkill ssh' (to kill an ssh tunnel
that's been broken by suspending my laptop) also likes to kill
ssh-agent, where killall does not. Of course, I learned all about the
/other/ face of killall when working on our SCO accounts & bookings
server :-(

One other issue with xkill is that it often doesn't fully kill
multi-threaded apps. OO.o and Mozilla in particular sometimes like to
sit and spin madly in the background after being xkill-ed or otherwise
losing their X display connection. Because of the way they work,
launching a new instance only tries to signal the existing instance to
open a new window - so the new instance also hangs trying to communicate
with the old instance. The only way to recover is to properly kill the
old instance.

> What's wrong with clicking the 'close' button in the window frame?

If the app has crashed, it usually doesn't work.

Craig Ringer