/bin/kill no longer works with negative PID

[Michael Selig]

Incorrectly gives a usage message, eg:

/bin/kill -1 -4321
==>
/bin/kill: invalid option -- '4'

A workaround appears to be to use "--" before the PID, but this is unsatisfactory, as existing scripts would have to be modified when they shouldn't have to be.

This problem has only appeared recently in 12.10.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

Thank you for this bug and helping making Ubuntu better.

Please run '/bin/kill --version', and report back the version. Also, next time please use 'ubuntu-bug' to open a bug. For example, in this case, 'ubuntu-bug coreutils'.

[Michael Selig (michael-selig)]

/bin/kill --version
==>
kill from procps-ng 3.3.3

This is from Ubuntu 13.04. When I reported the bug originally it was on 12.10 (which I no longer use). However the bug is still there on 13.04, unfortunately.

PS: Why has it taken over 8 months for this bug to be acknowledged? I thought it must have vanished into the bug black hole.

[Riku Voipio (riku-voipio)]

This should be reassigned to procps, /bin/kill is not in coreutils.

In debian this has been fixed procps-ng 3.3.4.

[C de-Avillez (hggdh2)]

Indeed, done. Bug marked Triaged.

@Michael Selig: one of the reasons it took that long is that there are very few volunteers to work on the bugs.

[Trent Lloyd (lathiat)]

Most shells (including bash, zsh) have a built-in for kill so it's done internally. Some shells don't so it executes /bin/kill instead which has this issue.

One comment noted this was fixed at some point in 2013 in version 3.3.4 but it apparently broke again at some point and is broken at least in 20.04 Focal's v3.3.16.

This was recently fixed again upstream here:
https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/merge_requests/77

Upstream v3.3.16 (in 20.04 Focal and 20.10 Hirsute) was released Dec 2019 without this fix. That fix was submitted upstream 3 years ago but only merged 11 months ago and was included in the v3.3.17 release which was made in Feb 2021 so not included in 20.04 Focal. 3.3.17 with the fix is already in 21.10 Impish.