Re: Stopping subprocesses

[rowdog]

What I really want to do is call B from another Perl script A, and A kills B (with system("kill PID") or whatever), thereby killing C as well.

One way to do that is to localize the HUP signal handler and then send a HUP signal to your process group. You can have A do

{
    local $SIG{HUP} = 'IGNORE';
    kill HUP => -$$;
}

I've attached a proof of concept demo. Sorry there's no backport, I got lazy once I had it working.

a.pl

#!/opt/perl/bin/perl
use 5.012;
use warnings;

say "A start";

my $pid;

unless ( $pid = fork ) {
    die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
    system("./b.pl");
    sleep 30;
    exit;
}

sleep 2;

say "A sending kill HUP -$$";

{
    local $SIG{HUP} = 'IGNORE';
    kill HUP => -$$;
}

say "A waiting for lost children";

while (1) {
    my $kid = waitpid -1, 0;
    $kid == -1 and last;
    say "A reaped child $kid";
}

say "A end";

b.pl

#!/opt/perl/bin/perl
use 5.012;
use warnings;

say "  B start";

my $pid;
unless ($pid = fork) {
    die "cannot fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
    system("./c.pl");
    sleep 30;
    exit;
}

say "  B waiting on lost children";

while (1) {
    my $kid = waitpid -1, 0;
    $kid == -1 and last;
    say "  B reaped child $kid";
}

sleep 30;

say "  B end";

c.pl

#!/opt/perl/bin/perl
use 5.012;
use warnings;

say "    C start";
sleep 30;
say "    C exit";

output

$ ./a.pl
A start
  B start
  B waiting on lost children
    C start
A sending kill HUP -20682
A waiting for lost children
A reaped child 20683
A end