How can I kill a whole process tree with Perl?

linux perl process solaris kill
oliver picture oliver · Nov 20, 2008 · Viewed 8.6k times · Source

What's the best way to kill a process and all its child processes from a Perl script? It should run at least under Linux and Solaris, and not require installation of any additional packages.

My guess would be to get a list of all processes and their parents by parsing files in /proc or by parsing the output of ps (neither of which seems portable between Linux and Solaris); and then killing all processes in the tree (which seems prone to race conditions).

I could live with the race conditions in this particular case, but how do I portably get the process list?

Answer

Chris Jester-Young picture Chris Jester-Young · Nov 20, 2008

If you can live with killing a process group, you can use the following:

kill -$signum, $pgid;

where $signum is the signal number, and $pgid is the process group ID. However, signal numbers aren't very portable, in which case you can (on some platforms; read perlfunc for explanation) do the following (to send SIGTERM, for example):

kill 'TERM', -$pgid;

Related questions

How do I configure Apache 2 to run Perl CGI scripts?

I would like to configure Apache 2 running on Kubuntu to execute Perl CGI scripts. I've tried some steps that I came across by googling, but nothing seems to work. What is the right way of achieving this?

Read More
How can I quickly sum all numbers in a file?

I have a file which contains several thousand numbers, each on it's own line: 34 42 11 6 2 99 ... I'm looking to write a script which will print the sum of all numbers in the file. I've got a solution, but it's not very efficient. (…

Read More
Turning multiple lines into one comma separated line

I have the following data in multiple lines: foo bar qux zuu sdf sdfasdf What I want to do is to convert them to one comma separated line: foo,bar,qux,zuu,sdf,sdfasdf What's the best unix one-liner to …

Read More