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what happens when you run pkill ""

I am trying to understand what happened, while working on my machine I noticed a crashed app with a

" " is not responding

force quit or wait message on it, it had this icon and was named image on the title bar and "" in the error message crashed app icon, I pressed force quit on the GUI and my mouse stopped clicking for a while. I then wanted to kill it through the terminal so I ran

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pkill ""

but my screen went black and I found myself back into login screen, after I signed in the screen went black again, after I restarted my device everything was fine.

but what exactly happened?

>Solution :

pkill (and pgrep) patterns use Extended Regular Expression (ERE) syntax. In ERE, the empty pattern "" matches any string. This is not the same as pattern " ", which only matches strings that contain the space character.

So your command pkill "" would have attempted to kill every process in your session.

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