how to make child process die after parent exists in perl

venky4289 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: how to make child process die after parent exists in perl by salva (Canon) on Jan 09, 2014 at 13:31 UTC
Doing that reliably is far from easy but there are several alternatives: Lock some file or semaphore on the parent and on every child process use a thread to wait until the lock is released. Then kill the child process from the thread. Allocate a new pty (IO::Pty) and set it as the children tty. Once the parent exits, children get a SIGHUP. On the children processes monitor the parent pid (`getppid()`). When it becomes 1 it means that the parent has exited. Though, for that to work you will have to use `fork+exec` to spawn the children instead of `system("... &")` in order to avoid the intermediate shell process.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: how to make child process die after parent exists in perl by Anonymous Monk on Jan 09, 2014 at 12:04 UTC
Through signals, see kill, and see Proc::Background and see perlipc	[reply]
Re: how to make child process die after parent exists in perl by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Jan 09, 2014 at 16:29 UTC
This seems virtually identical to this earlier PM post: Killing child process ... This stackoverflow comment-thread also has useful explanations of how `SIGTERM` is propagated in Unix/Linux. Be sure that you clearly understand the difference between this signal and `SIGKILL`. The graceful handling of a request to terminate is often done badly/incorrectly, resulting in unstable and awkward landings. Proc::Background is very good “sugar” to help smooth over many rough spots.