As I'm a great proponent of implementing in Perl rather than relying on external programs, I came up with the following more generic code which is a bit cleaner in that it doesn't depend on the external execution of
ps :
sub killchd ($;$) {
use Proc::ProcessTable;
my $sig = ($_[1] =~ /^\-?\d+$/) ? $_[1] : 0;
my $proc = Proc::ProcessTable->new;
my %fields = map { $_ => 1 } $proc->fields;
return undef unless exists $fields{'ppid'};
foreach (@{$proc->table}) {
kill $sig, $_->pid if ($_->ppid == $_[0]);
};
kill $sig, $_[0];
};
This subroutine takes two arguments, the parent process ID and the numeric signal to pass to the processes (which would be 9 if you wanted to issue a -TERM). Using Proc::Process you could find the process ID of the process login -- mrc with something similar to the following :
my $proc = Proc::ProcessTable->new;
my @ps = map { $_->pid if ($_->cmndline =~ /login -- mrc/) } @{$proc->
+table};
&killchd($_, 9) foreach @ps;
Ooohhh, Rob no beer function well without!