On Fri, 2010-10-29 at 00:54 -0700, perryh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > Martin Gregorie <martin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > ... its a system-wide kill unless you use the -u option > > to limit its effect to a specific user. > > Are you sure about that? > Read the manpage - that's pretty much what it says: "killall sends a signal to all processes running any of the specified commands." It says 'all processes', not 'all processes belonging to the current' and besides, if it can only kill processes belonging to the current user, why would it have the -u option without being a root-only program? > Last I knew, no non-root user can kill > a process belonging to another user (unless using su, sudo, etc). > A process that calls setuid() can run as though it was started by any user including root. My guess is that killall is one of them. They are very dangerous: setuid() should not be used without extremely good reason. killall is a marginal case IMO: in a lot of ways I wish its use was restricted to root. Martin I'd just assumed it was a suid program
