Bug 812815

Summary:	kill command reports success even if it killed nothing
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Martin Cermak <mcermak>
Component:	systemd	Assignee:	Jan Synacek <jsynacek>
Status:	CLOSED UPSTREAM	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	rawhide	CC:	azelinka, johannbg, jsynacek, mcermak, metherid, mschmidt, plautrba, rvokal, systemd-maint
Target Milestone:	---
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Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2015-09-21 13:19:28 UTC	Type:	Bug
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Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Martin Cermak 2012-04-16 10:15:39 UTC

Description of problem:

  In some cases, the systemd kill command returns zero exitcode although
  it has no real effect. This happens usually with services that are not
  typical daemons. Example services: ebtables, iptables, arptables_jf.

  In fact there is nothing to kill in these cases. But I think the kill command
  should either stop given service and return zero exitcode in case of success, 
  or should do nothing and return some non-zero exitcode. 

  It would be also nice if the kill command provided at least some feedback
  about what it did.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

  systemd-44-4.fc17.x86_64

Comment 1 Michal Schmidt 2012-04-16 11:16:47 UTC

Hm, yes, it seems reasonable to report "No process found" or similar when there's nothing to kill.

Comment 2 Martin Cermak 2013-08-02 12:55:27 UTC

Reproduced with systemd-204-8.fc19.x86_64. Moving to Rawhide.

Comment 3 Jan Synacek 2015-05-12 12:50:02 UTC

What exactly is your reproducer?

Comment 4 Martin Cermak 2015-05-13 12:10:22 UTC

(In reply to Jan Synacek from comment #3)
> What exactly is your reproducer?

Example:

fc20 x86_64 # systemctl status ebtables.service
ebtables.service - Ethernet Bridge Filtering tables
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/ebtables.service; disabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)

May 13 14:07:45 dhcp-24-165.brq.redhat.com systemd[1]: Stopped Ethernet Bridge Filtering tables.
fc20 x86_64 # systemctl kill ebtables.service
fc20 x86_64 # # here I'd expect message like "nothing was killed in fact, dude".

Comment 5 Jan Kurik 2015-07-15 15:10:02 UTC

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 23 development cycle.
Changing version to '23'.

(As we did not run this process for some time, it could affect also pre-Fedora 23 development
cycle bugs. We are very sorry. It will help us with cleanup during Fedora 23 End Of Life. Thank you.)

More information and reason for this action is here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora23

Comment 6 Jan Synacek 2015-09-21 13:19:28 UTC

Implemented in https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/1311.

It is now possible to use 'systemctl --fail kill ...' to get an error when there was nothing to kill.