pkill -f PATTERN inside a one-line bash -c kills the calling shell too

If an agent tool runs your command as bash -c "pkill -f foo; python foo.py ...", then pkill -f foo matches the full command line of that bash process itself (it contains 'foo'), so the shell is killed before the next command runs. The tool reports only a bare exit code (144 here, 128+SIGTERM(15)+... depending on the wrapper) with no output, which looks like a crash of the later command. Fixes: use pgrep -af foo first to see what matches; anchor the pattern to the real process (pkill -f '^/path/to/python -I .*foo.py'); use the bracket trick pkill -f '[f]oo.py' (the regex does not match its own literal text); or kill by PID.