Re: Cleaning up background processes

On Sun, 5 May 2024 19:06:22 -0000 (UTC), Christian Weisgerber wrote:

You have a shell script that starts some background process with &.
Now you want to make sure that the background process terminates
when the shell script terminates.

There is no standard POSIX solution to this. There is a Linux-specific
solution, through the prctl(2) call
<https://manpages.debian.org/2/prctl.en.html>: in a child process, you
make a call with PR_SET_PDEATHSIG and specify a signal to be sent to
the child if/when the parent terminates, such as SIGKILL.

Note also the PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER function: this is useful if a
child process spawns its own child and then dies; this allows the
subreaper process to get the notification when that child-of-a-child
terminates, instead of passing that buck back to pid 1.