A Decade of Kill Bugs

Alan Grow of Endcrawl traced an outage to /bin/kill in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (procps 4.0.4). He says getopt's option bundling made kill -TERM -1490947 parse as pid -1, so root signaled everything except init. He ties this to earlier negative-pid bugs in Ubuntu 14, 16, 18 and 22; the version history and FreeBSD's clean record are unverified. His advice: put -- before process group IDs, kill with least privilege, and parse argv positionally. A fix for Ubuntu 24 is reportedly on its way.