The first day I started working for a company that had Sparc/Solaris machines around I got warned about that, and to never use the "killall" command. On linux that kills just matching processes. On Solaris that literally kills all processes.
Even though I haven't had to deal with Solaris in about a decade, and it being safe to do killall, it took me ages to break out of the habit of doing:
I've always wondered why they inclued it. There seems to be literally no uses for it, even no case where it is anything but dangerous. Even when shutting down the system, init needs to run. Can anybody enlighten me?
"killall - kill all active processes killall is used by shutdown (1M) to kill all active processes not directly related to the shutdown procedure "
So, intended for use by shutdown(1M) and nothing else. It's basically a completely different utility to the Linux one. They just happen to, unfortunately, share the same name.
Even though I haven't had to deal with Solaris in about a decade, and it being safe to do killall, it took me ages to break out of the habit of doing: