[Bug 1077796] Re: /bin/kill no longer works with negative PID

[Trent Lloyd]

Most shells (including bash, zsh) have a built-in for kill so it's done
internally. Some shells don't so it executes /bin/kill instead which has
this issue.

One comment noted this was fixed at some point in 2013 in version 3.3.4
but it apparently broke again at some point and is broken at least in
20.04 Focal's v3.3.16.

This was recently fixed again upstream here:
https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/merge_requests/77

Upstream v3.3.16 (in 20.04 Focal and 20.10 Hirsute) was released Dec
2019 without this fix. That fix was submitted upstream 3 years ago but
only merged 11 months ago and was included in the v3.3.17 release which
was made in Feb 2021 so not included in 20.04 Focal. 3.3.17 with the fix
is already in 21.10 Impish.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1077796

Title:
  /bin/kill no longer works with negative PID

Status in procps package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Incorrectly gives a usage message, eg:

  /bin/kill -1 -4321
  ==>
  /bin/kill: invalid option -- '4'

  A workaround appears to be to use "--" before the PID, but this is
  unsatisfactory, as existing scripts would have to be modified when
  they shouldn't have to be.

  This problem has only appeared recently in 12.10.

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