Is it a bug of killall/pidof?

[john bigZ]

Hi,
  I was wondering why my kill script didn't work. the reason I found that the 'killall' failed with 'no process killed', was 'killall' called 'pidof', 'pidof' didn't return a process id for the given process name. After through investigation of the busybox sourcecode, I found out, that pidof doesn't parse /proc/$PID/cmdline for the process name instead it cuts out the text between the round braces in /proc/$PID/stat. This text usually contains the name of argv[0] and somehow this text contains "exe" instead of the real process name itself. pidof/killall will then not be able to find the PID to the given process name (you may try "pidof exe" instead, if you don't believe me).
  I don't know how to fix this problem, can anyone help me or give me some hints? I'd appreciate your help!
   
  Regards,
   
  John
   
  ------------------------------------------------------------------
  the experiment I did listed below, (first I tried to kill all the processes named 'syslogd', it failed. Then I tried to kill all the httpd processes, it worked as /proc/$PID/stat contained the right process name).
   
  firewall# ps -ef
  PID  Uid     VmSize Stat Command
    1 root        288 S   init
    2 root            SW  [keventd]
    3 root            SWN  [ksoftirqd_CPU0]
    4 root            SW  [kswapd]
    5 root            SW  [bdflush]
    6 root            SW  [kupdated]
    7 root            SW  [khubd]
  645 root        280 S   syslogd -m 0 -C
  646 root        264 S   klogd
  850 root        280 S   syslogd -m 0 -C
  856 root        264 S   klogd -c 1
  892 root        304 S   /usr/sbin/sshd -p 22
  905  root       3588 S   /usr/local/sbin/httpd -f /etc/httpd.conf
  922 root        292 S   crond -L /dev/null
  926 root        272 S   /sbin/getty 38400 tty1
  927 root        272 S   /sbin/getty 38400 tty2
  928 root        272 S   /sbin/getty 38400 tty3
  929 root       5092 S   /usr/local/sbin/httpd -f /etc/httpd.conf
  946 root       5048 S   /usr/local/sbin/httpd -f /etc/httpd.conf
  977 root        428 R   /usr/sbin/sshd -p 22
  978 root        332 S   -sh
 1031 root        252  R   ps -ef
firewall# killall -9 syslogd
killall: syslogd: no process killed
firewall#
  firewall# cat /proc/850/stat
850 (exe) S 1 849 849 0 -1 64 12 0 15 0 0 4 0 0 9 0 0 0 980 1077248 70 4294967295 134512640 134770336 3221225008 3221224576 1074021311 0 0 69633 24582 3222503337 0 0 17 0
firewall# cat /proc/946/stat
946 (httpd) S 905 905 905 0 -1 320 552 438 108 1565 16 18 0 12 9 0 0 0 26755 621
3632 1262 4294967295 134512640 136027432 3221224992 3221224364 1074081392 0 0 40
96 71329387 3223297762 0 0 17 0
firewall# killall -9 httpd
firewall# ps -ef
  PID  Uid     VmSize Stat Command
    1 root        288 S   init
    2 root            SW  [keventd]
    3  root            SWN [ksoftirqd_CPU0]
    4 root            SW  [kswapd]
    5 root            SW  [bdflush]
    6 root            SW  [kupdated]
    7 root            SW  [khubd]
  645 root        284 S   syslogd -m 0 -C
  646 root        264 S   klogd
  850 root        280 S   syslogd -m 0 -C
  856 root        264 S   klogd -c 1
  892 root        304  S   /usr/sbin/sshd -p 22
  922 root        292 S   crond -L /dev/null
  926 root        272 S   /sbin/getty 38400 tty1
  927 root        272 S   /sbin/getty 38400 tty2
  928 root        272 S   /sbin/getty 38400 tty3
  977 root        428 R   /usr/sbin/sshd -p 22
  978 root        332 S   -sh
 1039 root        252 R   ps -ef
firewall#
syslogd-m0-Cfirewall# busybox
BusyBox v1.2.1 (2007.04.23-19:37+0000) multi-call binary
  Usage: busybox [function] [arguments]...
   or: [function] [arguments]...
          BusyBox is a multi-call binary that combines many common Unix
        utilities into a single executable.  Most people will create a
        link to busybox for each function they wish to use and BusyBox
        will act like whatever it was invoked as!
  Currently defined functions:
        [, [[, arping, ash, basename, busybox, cat, chmod, chown, clear, cp, crond, crontab, cut, date, dd, df, dirname,
        dmesg, dos2unix, du, echo, false, fgrep, find, free, getopt, getty, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, hostname,
        hwclock, id, ifconfig, init, insmod, ipcalc, kill, killall, klogd, ln, logger, login, logread, ls, lsmod,  makedevs,
        md5sum, mesg, mkdir, mknod, more, mount, mv, nameif, nc, nslookup, passwd, pidof, ping, poweroff, printf, ps,
        pwd, rdate, reboot, reset, rm, rmdir, route, sed, sh, sleep, sort, stty, sync, syslogd, tail, tar, test, time,
        touch, tr, traceroute, true, tty, udhcpc, umount, uname, uniq, unix2dos, uptime, watchdog, wc, wget, which,
        yes, zcat
  firewall#
 
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