What's the best way to send a signal to all me

Question

I want to kill a whole process tree. What is the best way to do this using any common scripting languages? I am looking for a simple solution.

Answer 1

Thanks for your wisdom, folks. My script was leaving some child processes on exit and the negation tip made things easier. I wrote this function to be used in other scripts if necessary:

# kill my group's subprocesses:          killGroup
# kill also myself:                      killGroup -x
# kill another group's subprocesses:     killGroup N  
# kill that group all:                   killGroup -x N
# N: PID of the main process (= process group ID).

function killGroup () {
    local prid mainpid
    case $1 in
        -x) [ -n "$2" ] && kill -9 -$2 || kill -9 -$$ ;;
        "") mainpid=$$ ;;
         *) mainpid=$1 ;;
    esac
    prid=$(ps ax -o pid,pgid | grep $mainpid)
    prid=${prid//$mainpid/}
    kill -9 $prid 2>/dev/null
    return
}

Cheers.

Answer 2

Here is a variation of @zhigang's answer which does without AWK, relying only on Bash's native parsing possibilities:

function killtree {
  kill -STOP "$1"
  ps -e -o pid= -o ppid= | while read -r pid ppid
                           do
                             [[ $ppid = $1 ]] || continue
                             killtree "$pid"  || true # Skip over failures
                           done
  kill -CONT "$1"          
  kill -TERM "$1"
}

It seems to work fine on both Macs and Linux. In situations where you can't rely on being able to manage process groups -- like when writing scripts for testing a piece of software which must be built in multiple environments -- this tree-walking technique is definitely helpful.

Answer 3

Kill all the processes belonging to the same process tree using the Process Group ID (PGID)

• kill -- -$PGID     Use default signal (TERM = 15)
• kill -9 -$PGID     Use the signal KILL (9)

You can retrieve the PGID from any Process-ID (PID) of the same process tree

• kill -- -$(ps -o pgid= $PID | grep -o '[0-9]*')   (signal TERM)
• kill -9 -$(ps -o pgid= $PID | grep -o '[0-9]*')   (signal KILL)

^{Special thanks to tanager and Speakus for contributions on $PID remaining spaces and OSX compatibility.}

Explanation

• kill -9 -"$PGID" => Send signal 9 (KILL) to all child and grandchild...
• PGID=$(ps opgid= "$PID") => Retrieve the Process-Group-ID from any Process-ID of the tree, not only the Process-Parent-ID. A variation of ps opgid= $PID is ps -o pgid --no-headers $PID where pgid can be replaced by pgrp.
  But:
  • ps inserts leading spaces when PID is less than five digits and right aligned as noticed by tanager. You can use:
    PGID=$(ps opgid= "$PID" | tr -d ' ')
  • ps from OSX always print the header, therefore Speakus proposes:
    PGID="$( ps -o pgid "$PID" | grep [0-9] | tr -d ' ' )"
• grep -o [0-9]* prints successive digits only (does not print spaces or alphabetical headers).

Further command lines

PGID=$(ps -o pgid= $PID | grep -o [0-9]*)
kill -TERM -"$PGID"  # kill -15
kill -INT  -"$PGID"  # correspond to [CRTL+C] from keyboard
kill -QUIT -"$PGID"  # correspond to [CRTL+\] from keyboard
kill -CONT -"$PGID"  # restart a stopped process (above signals do not kill it)
sleep 2              # wait terminate process (more time if required)
kill -KILL -"$PGID"  # kill -9 if it does not intercept signals (or buggy)

Limitation

• As noticed by davide and Hubert Kario, when kill is invoked by a process belonging to the same tree, kill risks to kill itself before terminating the whole tree killing.
• Therefore, be sure to run the command using a process having a different Process-Group-ID.

---

Long story

> cat run-many-processes.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo "ProcessID=$$ begins ($0)"
./child.sh background &
./child.sh foreground
echo "ProcessID=$$ ends ($0)"

> cat child.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo "ProcessID=$$ begins ($0)"
./grandchild.sh background &
./grandchild.sh foreground
echo "ProcessID=$$ ends ($0)"

> cat grandchild.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo "ProcessID=$$ begins ($0)"
sleep 9999
echo "ProcessID=$$ ends ($0)"

Run the process tree in background using '&'

> ./run-many-processes.sh &    
ProcessID=28957 begins (./run-many-processes.sh)
ProcessID=28959 begins (./child.sh)
ProcessID=28958 begins (./child.sh)
ProcessID=28960 begins (./grandchild.sh)
ProcessID=28961 begins (./grandchild.sh)
ProcessID=28962 begins (./grandchild.sh)
ProcessID=28963 begins (./grandchild.sh)

> PID=$!                    # get the Parent Process ID
> PGID=$(ps opgid= "$PID")  # get the Process Group ID

> ps fj
 PPID   PID  PGID   SID TTY      TPGID STAT   UID   TIME COMMAND
28348 28349 28349 28349 pts/3    28969 Ss   33021   0:00 -bash
28349 28957 28957 28349 pts/3    28969 S    33021   0:00  \_ /bin/sh ./run-many-processes.sh
28957 28958 28957 28349 pts/3    28969 S    33021   0:00  |   \_ /bin/sh ./child.sh background
28958 28961 28957 28349 pts/3    28969 S    33021   0:00  |   |   \_ /bin/sh ./grandchild.sh background
28961 28965 28957 28349 pts/3    28969 S    33021   0:00  |   |   |   \_ sleep 9999
28958 28963 28957 28349 pts/3    28969 S    33021   0:00  |   |   \_ /bin/sh ./grandchild.sh foreground
28963 28967 28957 28349 pts/3    28969 S    33021   0:00  |   |       \_ sleep 9999
28957 28959 28957 28349 pts/3    28969 S    33021   0:00  |   \_ /bin/sh ./child.sh foreground
28959 28960 28957 28349 pts/3    28969 S    33021   0:00  |       \_ /bin/sh ./grandchild.sh background
28960 28964 28957 28349 pts/3    28969 S    33021   0:00  |       |   \_ sleep 9999
28959 28962 28957 28349 pts/3    28969 S    33021   0:00  |       \_ /bin/sh ./grandchild.sh foreground
28962 28966 28957 28349 pts/3    28969 S    33021   0:00  |           \_ sleep 9999
28349 28969 28969 28349 pts/3    28969 R+   33021   0:00  \_ ps fj

The command pkill -P $PID does not kill the grandchild:

> pkill -P "$PID"
./run-many-processes.sh: line 4: 28958 Terminated              ./child.sh background
./run-many-processes.sh: line 4: 28959 Terminated              ./child.sh foreground
ProcessID=28957 ends (./run-many-processes.sh)
[1]+  Done                    ./run-many-processes.sh

> ps fj
 PPID   PID  PGID   SID TTY      TPGID STAT   UID   TIME COMMAND
28348 28349 28349 28349 pts/3    28987 Ss   33021   0:00 -bash
28349 28987 28987 28349 pts/3    28987 R+   33021   0:00  \_ ps fj
    1 28963 28957 28349 pts/3    28987 S    33021   0:00 /bin/sh ./grandchild.sh foreground
28963 28967 28957 28349 pts/3    28987 S    33021   0:00  \_ sleep 9999
    1 28962 28957 28349 pts/3    28987 S    33021   0:00 /bin/sh ./grandchild.sh foreground
28962 28966 28957 28349 pts/3    28987 S    33021   0:00  \_ sleep 9999
    1 28961 28957 28349 pts/3    28987 S    33021   0:00 /bin/sh ./grandchild.sh background
28961 28965 28957 28349 pts/3    28987 S    33021   0:00  \_ sleep 9999
    1 28960 28957 28349 pts/3    28987 S    33021   0:00 /bin/sh ./grandchild.sh background
28960 28964 28957 28349 pts/3    28987 S    33021   0:00  \_ sleep 9999

The command kill -- -$PGID kills all processes including the grandchild.

> kill --    -"$PGID"  # default signal is TERM (kill -15)
> kill -CONT -"$PGID"  # awake stopped processes
> kill -KILL -"$PGID"  # kill -9 to be sure

> ps fj
 PPID   PID  PGID   SID TTY      TPGID STAT   UID   TIME COMMAND
28348 28349 28349 28349 pts/3    29039 Ss   33021   0:00 -bash
28349 29039 29039 28349 pts/3    29039 R+   33021   0:00  \_ ps fj

Conclusion

I notice in this example PID and PGID are equal (28957).
This is why I originally thought kill -- -$PID was enough. But in the case the process is spawn within a Makefile the Process ID is different from the Group ID.

I think kill -- -$(ps -o pgid= $PID | grep -o [0-9]*) is the best simple trick to kill a whole process tree when called from a different Group ID (another process tree).

Answer 4

If you want to kill a process by name:

killall -9 -g someprocessname

or

pgrep someprocessname | xargs pkill -9 -g

Answer 5

if you know pass the pid of the parent process, here's a shell script that should work:

for child in $(ps -o pid,ppid -ax | \
   awk "{ if ( \$2 == $pid ) { print \$1 }}")
do
  echo "Killing child process $child because ppid = $pid"
  kill $child
done

Answer 6

I use a little bit modified version of a method described here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5311362/563175

So it looks like that:

kill `pstree -p 24901 | sed 's/(/\n(/g' | grep '(' | sed 's/(\(.*\)).*/\1/' | tr "\n" " "`

where 24901 is parent's PID.

It looks pretty ugly but does it's job perfectly.