Catch Ctrl+C / SIGINT and exit multiprocesses gracefully in python

Question

How do I catch a Ctrl+C in multiprocess python program and exit all processes gracefully, I need the solution to work both on unix and windows. I've tried the following:

import multiprocessing
import time
import signal
import sys

jobs = []

def worker():
    signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, signal_handler)
    while(True):
        time.sleep(1.1234)
        print "Working..."

def signal_handler(signal, frame):
    print 'You pressed Ctrl+C!'
    # for p in jobs:
    #     p.terminate()
    sys.exit(0)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    for i in range(50):
        p = multiprocessing.Process(target=worker)
        jobs.append(p)
        p.start()

And it's kind of working, but I don't think it's the right solution.

Answer 1

The previously accepted solution has race conditions and it does not work with map and async functions.

---

The correct way to handle Ctrl+C/SIGINT with multiprocessing.Pool is to:

1. Make the process ignore SIGINT before a process Pool is created. This way created child processes inherit SIGINT handler.
2. Restore the original SIGINT handler in the parent process after a Pool has been created.
3. Use map_async and apply_async instead of blocking map and apply.
4. Wait on the results with timeout because the default blocking waits to ignore all signals. This is Python bug https://bugs.python.org/issue8296.

---

Putting it together:

#!/bin/env python
from __future__ import print_function

import multiprocessing
import os
import signal
import time

def run_worker(delay):
    print("In a worker process", os.getpid())
    time.sleep(delay)

def main():
    print("Initializng 2 workers")
    original_sigint_handler = signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, signal.SIG_IGN)
    pool = multiprocessing.Pool(2)
    signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, original_sigint_handler)
    try:
        print("Starting 2 jobs of 5 seconds each")
        res = pool.map_async(run_worker, [5, 5])
        print("Waiting for results")
        res.get(60) # Without the timeout this blocking call ignores all signals.
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        print("Caught KeyboardInterrupt, terminating workers")
        pool.terminate()
    else:
        print("Normal termination")
        pool.close()
    pool.join()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

As @YakovShklarov noted, there is a window of time between ignoring the signal and unignoring it in the parent process, during which the signal can be lost. Using pthread_sigmask instead to temporarily block the delivery of the signal in the parent process would prevent the signal from being lost, however, it is not available in Python-2.