I had to go check but it has been over 3 years since the last psmisc release back in February 2014. I really didn’t think it had been that long ago.  Anyhow, with no further delay, psmisc version 23.0 has been released today!

Update: 23.1 is out now, removed some debug line out of killall and shipped two missing documents.

This release is just a few feature update and minor bug fixes. The changelog lists them all, but these are the highlights.

killall namespace filtering

killall was not aware of namespaces, which meant if you wanted to kill all specified processes in the root namespace, it did that, but also all the child namespaces. So now it will only by default kill processes in its current PID namespace, and there is a new -n flag to specify 0 for all or a PID to use the namespace of.

killall command name parsing

This is similar to the bug sudo had where it didn’t parse process names properly. A crafted process name meant killall missed it, even if you specified the username or tty. While I checked for procps having this problem (it didn’t) I didn’t check psmisc. Now killall and sudo use a similar parsing method as procps.

New program: pslog

Wanted to know what logs a process is writing to? pslog can help you here. It will report on what files in /var/log are opened by the specified process ID.

pslog 26475
Pid no 26475:
Log path: /opt/observium/logs/error_log
Log path: /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log
Log path: /opt/observium/logs/access_log

Finding psmisc

psmisc will be available in your usual distributions shortly. The Debian packages are about to be uploaded and will be in the sid distribution soon.  Other distributions I imagine will follow.

For the source code, look in the GitLab repository or the Sourceforge file location.