On 04/23, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: > > [widening CC] add more CC's > The man page says "For requests other than PTRACE_KILL, Argh, PTRACE_KILL again. You know, I simply do not know what it was supposed to do. I can only see what the code actually does. > the child process > must be stopped." Yes and no. Yes, ptrace(PTRACE_KILL) "succeeds" even if the tracee is not stopped. No, it has no effect if the tracee is not stopped. All I can say is: PTRACE_KILL should never exist. If you want to kill the tracee, you can do kill(SIGKILL). Roughly, ptrace(PTRACE_KILL) is equal to ptrace(PTRACE_CONT, SIGKILL) except it always returns 0. > If the man page is describing actual intended kernel behavior, then it's a > fairly long-standing kernel bug. Perhaps. May be it should simply do kill(SIGKILL), but then it is not clear why do we have PTRACE_KILL. And once again, I was never able to understand the supposed behaviour. Personally, I think we should fix the documentation. And imho the only possible fix is to add this note: do not ever use PTRACE_KILL. Oleg. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
