We recently discovered that GNU kill, going beyond spec, will take a name as its argument and try to kill all processes with that name, in the same vein as pkill(1) or some implementations of killall.I haven't been able to find GNU's changelog for kill. When was that feature added?
How long has GNU kill(1) accepted a name argument?
kill
You can browse the source of Gnu coreutils on Savannah (or clone the repository on your machine), and in particular look at the source and the changelog of the kill utility. There is not and has never been such a feature.do {      intmax_t n = (errno = 0, strtoimax (arg, &endp, 10));            if (errno == ERANGE || pid != n || arg == endp || *endp)        {          error (0, 0, _(%s: invalid process id), arg);          status = EXIT_FAILURE;        }      } while ((arg = *++argv));The manpage you link to is for the kill command from the util-linux collection. As you can see from the date of the man page, this feature is very old. Many Linux systems ship the kill command from GNU coreutils, or the one from the procps package, and most of the time you'll see your shell's builtin rather than the external command anyway. None of these allow you to pass a bare command name as an argument.On a related note, in bash, ksh and zsh, you can pass any job specification as an argument to kill. Job specifications start with a % and can be followed by a job number or by a part of the name of the command of that job.$ jobs[3] +  Running                 sleep 9999 &[2] - Stopped                  vim foo[1]    Running                 xterm &$ kill %sleep[3] + Terminated               sleep 9999 &$ jobs[2] + Stopped                  vim foo[1] -  Running                 xterm &