You are looking for Proc::Killfam. Many, if not most times, when you fork to run a program, you end up getting the shell pid of actual program you ran. So if you killfam 9 that toplevel shell, you should get them all.
I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh

In reply to Re^3: Killing a system/exec/`` call if it times out by zentara
in thread Killing a system/exec/`` call if it times out by Cagao

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