xkill Safety

Maxwell Anselm silverhammermba at gmail.com
Fri Jul 25 06:33:34 PDT 2014


Some Arch users noticed that when killing their X sessions without closing
all windows first, some programs (namely Chromium and Libreoffice) later
complained that they had not been properly shut down. The solution we came
up with was a little program to XKillClient each window before quitting X.

Looking at the source code for xkill, I realized this is essentially the
same as "xkill -all" -- albeit without the strict confirmation check.
xkill's man page mentions that this is "very dangerous" and "highly
discouraged" but for us it turned out to be the nice way to quit X.

What's the deal? Are we doing something really stupid without realizing it,
or is xkill's man page exaggerating the safety risk?

Thanks,
Max

P.S. the forum thread where this is being discussed:
bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=179489&p=2
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