Re: Stopping subprocesses

DISCLOSURE: A Windows guy is about to offer a Linux suggestion. The suggestion may be stupid, crazy, weird or wrong or some combination of the above.

Now that we've moved past the disclaimer, here's my thoughts. If you have the process ID for script B, wouldn't it be possible to use the Linux command pkill with the -P option to kill script B and all of it's child processes? If that does work, I would think that it should be trivial calling that from script A.

From the man page on pkill's -P option: Only match processes whose parent process ID is listed.

Being that I primarily work in the Windows environment, I'm not sure if what I'm suggesting even makes sense, but thought that I'd toss it out in case I'm miraculously correct. Of course, I suspect that I might be overlooking something.

Comment on Re: Stopping subprocesses

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Re^2: Stopping subprocesses by James Board (Beadle) on Aug 24, 2010 at 14:00 UTC
I don't think that will work because if B ends before C, then C will adopt a new parent and that parent isn't A. So, there's no way to know that C is a descendent of A.	[reply]
Re^3: Stopping subprocesses by dasgar (Priest) on Aug 24, 2010 at 18:27 UTC
Hmmm....Two thoughts about that. First: Assuming that script B on its own won't end without its child processes to end first, I think that calling pkill from script A will kill script B's child processes. Then if script A kills script B directly, then you won't hit that issue. Of course, I may be assuming more than I should or assuming incorrectly. Second: If script B is coded such that it can call die without killing its child processes, I would think that there should be a way to modify the code to call pkill first to kill its child processes before actually exiting out. Of course, if something else is killing from the OS, then you might have the orphaned processes as you described. I'm not disagreeing with you. Just thinking out loud in case any of this might be helpful for you or others to figure out a solution. That and hoping that I don't sound like a blabbering idiot. :D	[reply]