On Linux killall lets you killall all processes matching a name.

On Solaris killall kills all processes.

To make matters worse, I used the command on a sever with a hung console -- so it didn't apply immediately, but later in the middle of the day the console got unhung and the main database server went down.

Explaining that this was an earnest error and not something malicious to the PHBs was somewhat ... delicate. "So why did you kill all the processes?" "Because I didn't expect it to do that." "But the command name is kill all?" ...