Comment 35 for bug 406397

While implementing a new upstart script, i also ran into this problem, and am now stuck with a job waiting for a non-existing pid.

I think the worst-case scenario has not been mentioned yet, which is that when the actual pid does appear, it will be killed by this job thinking it is the process it has been waiting to kill. This could be a harmless process (or even created for that purpose by a script mentioned above), but it could also be a critical process. Thus the bug is less harmless than it appears to be.