Hacker News Reader

I feel a bit nerd sniped: On Linux PIDs are only unique within a PID namespace. But that doesn't matter because the entire point of a PID namespace is to isolate processes.

But it's worth mentioning because it can mitigate the problem you've laid out. If you have a long running process that may need to kill its children, you can start with within a new PID namespace such that it may only kill its children (or descendant).

View on HN

That should only be a problem if you're running as root. Running as a dedicated user is also a mitigation.

This doesn't entirely solve the problem of potentially killing the wrong process though

No but it is a lot less likely for a PID to get reused on accident within a new PID namespace.

It's really no less likely, namespace or not. There are better mechanisms for handling this situation, pidfds for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com