Ensuring subprocesses are dead on exiting Python p

Question

Is there a way to ensure all created subprocess are dead at exit time of a Python program? By subprocess I mean those created with subprocess.Popen().

If not, should I iterate over all of the issuing kills and then kills -9? anything cleaner?

Answer 1

poll( )

Check if child process has terminated. Returns returncode attribute.

Answer 2

A solution for windows may be to use the win32 job api e.g. How do I automatically destroy child processes in Windows?

Here's an existing python implementation

https://gist.github.com/ubershmekel/119697afba2eaecc6330

Answer 3

help for python code: http://docs.python.org/dev/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.Popen.wait

Answer 4

You can try subalive, a package I wrote for similar problem. It uses periodic alive ping via RPC, and the slave process automatically terminates when the master stops alive pings for some reason.

https://github.com/waszil/subalive

Example for master:

from subalive import SubAliveMaster

# start subprocess with alive keeping
SubAliveMaster(<path to your slave script>)

# do your stuff
# ...

Example for slave subprocess:

from subalive import SubAliveSlave

# start alive checking
SubAliveSlave()

# do your stuff
# ...

Answer 5

Find out a solution for linux (without installing prctl):

def _set_pdeathsig(sig=signal.SIGTERM):
    """help function to ensure once parent process exits, its childrent processes will automatically die
    """
    def callable():
        libc = ctypes.CDLL("libc.so.6")
        return libc.prctl(1, sig)
    return callable


subprocess.Popen(your_command, preexec_fn=_set_pdeathsig(signal.SIGTERM)) 

Answer 6

You can use atexit for this, and register any clean up tasks to be run when your program exits.

atexit.register(func[, *args[, **kargs]])

In your cleanup process, you can also implement your own wait, and kill it when a your desired timeout occurs.

>>> import atexit
>>> import sys
>>> import time
>>> 
>>> 
>>>
>>> def cleanup():
...     timeout_sec = 5
...     for p in all_processes: # list of your processes
...         p_sec = 0
...         for second in range(timeout_sec):
...             if p.poll() == None:
...                 time.sleep(1)
...                 p_sec += 1
...         if p_sec >= timeout_sec:
...             p.kill() # supported from python 2.6
...     print 'cleaned up!'
...
>>>
>>> atexit.register(cleanup)
>>>
>>> sys.exit()
cleaned up!

Note -- Registered functions won't be run if this process (parent process) is killed.

The following windows method is no longer needed for python >= 2.6

Here's a way to kill a process in windows. Your Popen object has a pid attribute, so you can just call it by success = win_kill(p.pid) (Needs pywin32 installed):

    def win_kill(pid):
        '''kill a process by specified PID in windows'''
        import win32api
        import win32con

        hProc = None
        try:
            hProc = win32api.OpenProcess(win32con.PROCESS_TERMINATE, 0, pid)
            win32api.TerminateProcess(hProc, 0)
        except Exception:
            return False
        finally:
            if hProc != None:
                hProc.Close()

        return True