I read a great tweet the other year,
Was hoping to get some verbose output from pkill, ran
pkill -9 -v process_name. Ho boy. — Maxime Chevalier (@Love2Code) September 21, 2016
I can't say I've ever used pkill so had to do a tiny bit of digging through the man pages of pkill
PKILL(1) BSD General Commands Manual PKILL(1)
NAME
pgrep, pkill -- find or signal processes by name
SYNOPSIS
pkill [-signal] [-ILafilnovx] [-F pidfile] [-G gid] [-P ppid] [-U uid] [-g pgrp] [-t tty] [-u euid] pattern ...
DESCRIPTION
The pkill command searches the process table on the running system and signals all processes that match the criteria given on the command line.
The following options are available:
...
-v Reverse the sense of the matching; display processes that do not match the given criteria.
So heh, pkill is based on pgrep which is based on grep and -v is the shorthand notation of --invert-match so the previous command becomes kill everything (with extreme prejudice) that isn't named process_name. Ho boy indeed. Of course it's an easy mistake to make, I'm certain I would have fallen prey of this eventually had I not seen this tweet. I'm known for simply throwing more than a few -vvvvvvvvvvvvv's onto commands that don't behave as I'd expect.
But AHA! I have the solution - just be more explicit and use the -- notation
Well.... not quite.
For some crazy bizarro reason pkill and pgrep don't have the double dash equivalent of v/invert-match. I'm sure there is a sane and logical rationale for this but then again, given it's computers all the way down, maybe not.
It's shit isn't it? Even the most standard tools we use as developers take the principle of least astonishment and just throw it into the endlessly burning tyre fire of misery and terrible user experience.
So what can we do? Easy! TRUST. NOTHING. Never assume anything. Slow down. Think. Think even when it seems obvious. Think even when you've written the same command for the 100th time. If you can't think or don't want to think make sure everything you do isn't irrevocably destructive, make sure you can get back to the same point you where at before you went and destroyed the world in a raging hellfire of accidental typage.