Renaming "killall" and forever symlinking the old name to the new name

[Jason Spiro]

Jason Spiro <jasonspiro4 <at> gmail.com> writes:

[snip]
>
> You could rename killall to something else, and update the manpage to show the
> new name, then symlink or hard link "killall" to the new name forever.  This
> would encourage people to use the new name, but it would never force them to.
> 
> Xin, what do you think?

Since Xin and I CC'ed each other so often in this thread, Gmail automatically
added us to each others' Gtalk instant-messenger contact lists.  Since it'd been
more than a month and Xin still hadn't replied to this message, I instant
messaged him the idea and asked him what he thought.  He replied that, in his
opinion, this new idea is pointless:  nobody would notice the renaming, and it
would just cause confusion.  I asked, what if the tool would show a hint
onscreen if you called it using the old name?  He said no.  He said people can
just use pkill.

I hope Eitan Adler's patch[1], which adds a "verbose" option to pkill, will get
accepted, and that a similar patch will get accepted into the Linux pkill,
maintained by Albert Calahan.

^  [1].  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.freebsd.devel.hackers/38636