psmisc version 22.16 was released today. It is a bugfix release that bascially fixes a problem around strings in C. Process name lengths are only supposed to be 16 characters long, so a 17 bye buffer is ok; until you have processes with brackets which means the string is 18 characters.
The next wrinkle is that at times the brackets are stripped out so matches fail because the lengths don’t quite line up. You’ll see this with the Debian 22.15-2 version of psmisc where killall won’t find long-named processes.
So, 22.16 fixes all that.
Test Processes
It really shows that psmisc needs a set of tests like procps has already. The difficulty with both is that its not simple in the DejaGNU framework to make test processes. These are not the programs within the package but other processes that the programs can work on. There really needs to be an equivalent to touch for processes just for this sort of thing. Creating processes is rather simple, but ensuring they go away is the tricky part, or they die with certain signals.
