"Hey, I just tried to pkill a service and I got disconnected from the machine and now I can't reconnect." a co-worker just said.
"What'd you kill?" Jim asked.
"Um... oh, I used -v instead of -f. What does -v do?"
PGREP(1) Linux User’s Manual PGREP(1)
NAME
pgrep, pkill - look up or signal processes based on name and other
attributes
...
DESCRIPTION
...
pkill will send the specified signal (by default SIGTERM) to each
process instead of listing them on stdout.
OPTIONS
...
-v Negates the matching.
OH. Worst, option, ever. To be fair, I suspect that that option exists because pkill is probably just a thin wrapper on pgrep. But still.
It probably didn't help matters that he ran pkill via sudo.