How to terminate a python subprocess launched with

Question

I'm launching a subprocess with the following command:

p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)

However, when I try to kill using:

p.terminate()

or

p.kill()

The command keeps running in the background, so I was wondering how can I actually terminate the process.

Note that when I run the command with:

p = subprocess.Popen(cmd.split(), stdout=subprocess.PIPE)

It does terminate successfully when issuing the p.terminate().

Answer 1

Use a process group so as to enable sending a signal to all the process in the groups. For that, you should attach a session id to the parent process of the spawned/child processes, which is a shell in your case. This will make it the group leader of the processes. So now, when a signal is sent to the process group leader, it's transmitted to all of the child processes of this group.

Here's the code:

import os
import signal
import subprocess

# The os.setsid() is passed in the argument preexec_fn so
# it's run after the fork() and before  exec() to run the shell.
pro = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, 
                       shell=True, preexec_fn=os.setsid) 

os.killpg(os.getpgid(pro.pid), signal.SIGTERM)  # Send the signal to all the process groups

Answer 2

what i feel like we could use:

import os
import signal
import subprocess
p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)

os.killpg(os.getpgid(pro.pid), signal.SIGINT)

this will not kill all your task but the process with the p.pid

Answer 3

I could do it using

from subprocess import Popen

process = Popen(command, shell=True)
Popen("TASKKILL /F /PID {pid} /T".format(pid=process.pid))

it killed the cmd.exe and the program that i gave the command for.

(On Windows)

Answer 4

I know this is an old question but this may help someone looking for a different method. This is what I use on windows to kill processes that I've called.

si = subprocess.STARTUPINFO()
si.dwFlags |= subprocess.STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW
subprocess.call(["taskkill", "/IM", "robocopy.exe", "/T", "/F"], startupinfo=si)

/IM is the image name, you can also do /PID if you want. /T kills the process as well as the child processes. /F force terminates it. si, as I have it set, is how you do this without showing a CMD window. This code is used in python 3.

Answer 5

When shell=True the shell is the child process, and the commands are its children. So any SIGTERM or SIGKILL will kill the shell but not its child processes, and I don't remember a good way to do it. The best way I can think of is to use shell=False, otherwise when you kill the parent shell process, it will leave a defunct shell process.

Answer 6

None of this answers worked for me so Im leaving the code that did work. In my case even after killing the process with .kill() and getting a .poll() return code the process didn't terminate.

Following the subprocess.Popen documentation:

"...in order to cleanup properly a well-behaved application should kill the child process and finish communication..."

proc = subprocess.Popen(...)
try:
    outs, errs = proc.communicate(timeout=15)
except TimeoutExpired:
    proc.kill()
    outs, errs = proc.communicate()

In my case I was missing the proc.communicate() after calling proc.kill(). This clean the process stdin, stdout ... and does terminate the process.