Bug#1033311: sysvinit-utils: pidof not always returning a pid when using the full path to a program

[Markus Fischer]

Package: sysvinit-utils
Version: 3.06-2
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: none

Dear Maintainer,

Passing the full path of a binary to the pidof command does not always
return a pid although the process is running and the man page of the
pidof command explicitly notes that it can be used that way.

This might be related to the fact that all programs with which I tested
this and which show this unexpected behaviour were symlinks (i.e.,
"which <PROGRAM>" returned a symlink). However, on Debian Bullseye the
behaviour is as I expected it.


Steps to reproduce:
* start vi
* in another shell run "pidof vi" and "pidof $(which vi)"

Result:
The first pidof invocation correctly returns a pid but the second
invocation does not.

Expected result:
Both invocations of pidof should return a pid. 


-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
  APT prefers testing-security
  APT policy: (500, 'testing-security'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-6-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages sysvinit-utils depends on:
ii  libc6  2.36-8

sysvinit-utils recommends no packages.

sysvinit-utils suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information