How can I kill subprocesses when the main script dies?

[Anonymous Monk]

using IIS(ew!!) and the occassionally it timeouts my perl script. however the processes started by my perl script keep going. i know how to get the PIDs for them, but is there a generic way to kill them before the outside program (IIS) kills my script? thanks

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

[chromatic]

Maybe an END block:

END {
    kill 'INT' => keys %children;
}

If you keep the PIDs for your kids in %children, that'll do it. For example, the following script dies, but still prints the ending notice:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

BEGIN {
    print "This is at the start\n";
}

die;

print "This is in the middle.\n";

exit;

print "This should never print.\n";

END {
    print "This is in the end.\n";
}

[merlyn]

An END block won't be executed unless a signal handler has been established, even if the signal handler simply dies.

The briefest way to do that is something like:

$SIG{INT} = sub { die };