Sys5 killall: Bane of all regular linux administrators that also sometimes administered solaris boxes.

Once after blowing up an in production database server during the day, I suffered the unfortunate difficulty of having to explain why running a command "killall" on a critical server that killed everything was an innocent mistake and that I didn't have any reason to expect it to kill everything.

It's extremely difficult to not sound like a moron when explaining that you didn't expect "killall" to "kill all".

+1 - pgrep and pkill should be more widely 'taught' for this reason

So it's functionally equivalent to `kill` with PID of -1, which is what we used to use back in the old days anyway. `kill -9 -1` should only kill your user processes if you're not root.

killall5 was our favorite way to log off the machine in high school, at least until the (clearly incompetent) lab administrator removed its execute permissions because it had “kill” in its name.