Ensuring subprocesses are dead on exiting Python program

poll( )

Check if child process has terminated.
Returns returncode attribute.

Is there a way to ensure all created subprocess are dead at exit time of a Python program? By subprocess I mean those created with subprocess.Popen().

You could violate encapsulation and test that all Popen processes have terminated by doing

subprocess._cleanup()
print subprocess._active == []

If not, should I iterate over all of the issuing kills and then kills -9? anything cleaner?

You cannot ensure that all subprocesses are dead without going out and killing every survivor. But if you have this problem, it is probably because you have a deeper design problem.

The subprocess.Popen.wait() is the only way to assure that they’re dead. Indeed, POSIX OS’s require that you wait on your children. Many *nix’s will create a “zombie” process: a dead child for which the parent didn’t wait.

If the child is reasonably well-written, it terminates. Often, children read from PIPE’s. Closing the input is a big hint to the child that it should close up shop and exit.

If the child has bugs and doesn’t terminate, you may have to kill it. You should fix this bug.

If the child is a “serve-forever” loop, and is not designed to terminate, you should either kill it or provide some input or message which will force it to terminate.

Edit.

In standard OS’s, you have os.kill( PID, 9 ). Kill -9 is harsh, BTW. If you can kill them with SIGABRT (6?) or SIGTERM (15) that’s more polite.

In Windows OS, you don’t have an os.kill that works. Look at this ActiveState Recipe for terminating a process in Windows.

We have child processes that are WSGI servers. To terminate them we do a GET on a special URL; this causes the child to clean up and exit.

This is what I did for my posix app:

When your app exists call the kill() method of this class:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/libs/subProcess.py

Example use here:
http://code.google.com/p/fslint/source/browse/trunk/fslint-gui#608

On *nix’s, maybe using process groups can help you out – you can catch subprocesses spawned by your subprocesses as well.

if __name__ == "__main__":
  os.setpgrp() # create new process group, become its leader
  try:
    # some code
  finally:
    os.killpg(0, signal.SIGKILL) # kill all processes in my group

Another consideration is to escalate the signals: from SIGTERM (default signal for kill) to SIGKILL (a.k.a kill -9). Wait a short while between the signals to give the process a chance to exit cleanly before you kill -9 it.

help for python code:
http://docs.python.org/dev/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.Popen.wait

I needed a small variation of this problem (cleaning up subprocesses, but without exiting the Python program itself), and since it’s not mentioned here among the other answers:

p=subprocess.Popen(your_command, preexec_fn=os.setsid)
os.killpg(os.getpgid(p.pid), 15)

setsid will run the program in a new session, thus assigning a new process group to it and its children. calling os.killpg on it thus won’t bring down your own python process also.

Warning: Linux-only! You can make your child receive a signal when its parent dies.

First install python-prctl==1.5.0 then change your parent code to launch your child processes as follows

subprocess.Popen(["sleep", "100"], preexec_fn=lambda: prctl.set_pdeathsig(signal.SIGKILL))

What this says is:

• launch subprocess: sleep 100
• after forking and before exec of the subprocess, the child registers for “send me a SIGKILL
  when my parent terminates”.

orip’s answer is helpful but has the downside that it kills your process and returns an error code your parent. I avoided that like this:

class CleanChildProcesses:
  def __enter__(self):
    os.setpgrp() # create new process group, become its leader
  def __exit__(self, type, value, traceback):
    try:
      os.killpg(0, signal.SIGINT) # kill all processes in my group
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
      # SIGINT is delievered to this process as well as the child processes.
      # Ignore it so that the existing exception, if any, is returned. This
      # leaves us with a clean exit code if there was no exception.
      pass

And then:

  with CleanChildProcesses():
    # Do your work here

Of course you can do this with try/except/finally but you have to handle the exceptional and non-exceptional cases separately.

A solution for windows may be to use the win32 job api e.g. How do I automatically destroy child processes in Windows?

Here’s an existing python implementation

https://gist.github.com/ubershmekel/119697afba2eaecc6330

I actually needed to do this, but it involved running remote commands. We wanted to be able to stop the processes by closing the connection to the server. Also, if, for example, you are running in the python repl, you can select to run as foreground if you want to be able to use Ctrl-C to exit.

import os, signal, time

class CleanChildProcesses:
    """
    with CleanChildProcesses():
        Do work here
    """
    def __init__(self, time_to_die=5, foreground=False):
        self.time_to_die = time_to_die  # how long to give children to die before SIGKILL
        self.foreground = foreground  # If user wants to receive Ctrl-C
        self.is_foreground = False
        self.SIGNALS = (signal.SIGHUP, signal.SIGTERM, signal.SIGABRT, signal.SIGALRM, signal.SIGPIPE)
        self.is_stopped = True  # only call stop once (catch signal xor exiting 'with')

    def _run_as_foreground(self):
        if not self.foreground:
            return False
        try:
            fd = os.open(os.ctermid(), os.O_RDWR)
        except OSError:
            # Happens if process not run from terminal (tty, pty)
            return False

        os.close(fd)
        return True

    def _signal_hdlr(self, sig, framte):
        self.__exit__(None, None, None)

    def start(self):
        self.is_stopped = False
        """
        When running out of remote shell, SIGHUP is only sent to the session
        leader normally, the remote shell, so we need to make sure we are sent 
        SIGHUP. This also allows us not to kill ourselves with SIGKILL.
        - A process group is called orphaned when the parent of every member is 
            either in the process group or outside the session. In particular, 
            the process group of the session leader is always orphaned.
        - If termination of a process causes a process group to become orphaned, 
            and some member is stopped, then all are sent first SIGHUP and then 
            SIGCONT.
        consider: prctl.set_pdeathsig(signal.SIGTERM)
        """
        self.childpid = os.fork()  # return 0 in the child branch, and the childpid in the parent branch
        if self.childpid == 0:
            try:
                os.setpgrp()  # create new process group, become its leader
                os.kill(os.getpid(), signal.SIGSTOP)  # child fork stops itself
            finally:
                os._exit(0)  # shut down without going to __exit__

        os.waitpid(self.childpid, os.WUNTRACED)  # wait until child stopped after it created the process group
        os.setpgid(0, self.childpid)  # join child's group

        if self._run_as_foreground():
            hdlr = signal.signal(signal.SIGTTOU, signal.SIG_IGN)  # ignore since would cause this process to stop
            self.controlling_terminal = os.open(os.ctermid(), os.O_RDWR)
            self.orig_fore_pg = os.tcgetpgrp(self.controlling_terminal)  # sends SIGTTOU to this process
            os.tcsetpgrp(self.controlling_terminal, self.childpid)
            signal.signal(signal.SIGTTOU, hdlr)
            self.is_foreground = True

        self.exit_signals = dict((s, signal.signal(s, self._signal_hdlr))
                                 for s in self.SIGNALS)                                     

    def stop(self):
        try:
            for s in self.SIGNALS:
                #don't get interrupted while cleaning everything up
                signal.signal(s, signal.SIG_IGN)

            self.is_stopped = True

            if self.is_foreground:
                os.tcsetpgrp(self.controlling_terminal, self.orig_fore_pg)
                os.close(self.controlling_terminal)
                self.is_foreground = False

            try:
                os.kill(self.childpid, signal.SIGCONT)
            except OSError:
                """
                can occur if process finished and one of:
                - was reaped by another process
                - if parent explicitly ignored SIGCHLD
                    signal.signal(signal.SIGCHLD, signal.SIG_IGN)
                - parent has the SA_NOCLDWAIT flag set 
                """
                pass

            os.setpgrp()  # leave the child's process group so I won't get signals
            try:
                os.killpg(self.childpid, signal.SIGINT)
                time.sleep(self.time_to_die)  # let processes end gracefully
                os.killpg(self.childpid, signal.SIGKILL)  # In case process gets stuck while dying
                os.waitpid(self.childpid, 0)  # reap Zombie child process
            except OSError as e:
                pass
        finally:
            for s, hdlr in self.exit_signals.iteritems():
                signal.signal(s, hdlr)  # reset default handlers

    def __enter__(self):
        if self.is_stopped:
            self.start()

    def __exit__(self, exit_type, value, traceback):
        if not self.is_stopped:
            self.stop()

Thanks to Malcolm Handley for the initial design. Done with python2.7 on linux.

Find out a solution for linux (without installing prctl):

def _set_pdeathsig(sig=signal.SIGTERM):
    """help function to ensure once parent process exits, its childrent processes will automatically die
    """
    def callable():
        libc = ctypes.CDLL("libc.so.6")
        return libc.prctl(1, sig)
    return callable


subprocess.Popen(your_command, preexec_fn=_set_pdeathsig(signal.SIGTERM)) 

You can try subalive, a package I wrote for similar problem. It uses periodic alive ping via RPC, and the slave process automatically terminates when the master stops alive pings for some reason.

https://github.com/waszil/subalive

Example for master:

from subalive import SubAliveMaster

# start subprocess with alive keeping
SubAliveMaster(<path to your slave script>)

# do your stuff
# ...

Example for slave subprocess:

from subalive import SubAliveSlave

# start alive checking
SubAliveSlave()

# do your stuff
# ...

It’s possible to get some more guarantees on windows by spawning a separate process to oversee the destruction.

import subprocess
import sys
import os

def terminate_process_on_exit(process):
    if sys.platform == "win32":
        try:
            # Or provide this script normally. 
            # Here just to make it somewhat self-contained.
            # see https://stackoverflow.com/a/22559493/3763139
            # see https://superuser.com/a/1299350/388191
            with open('.process_watchdog_helper.bat', 'x') as file:
                file.write(""":waitforpid
tasklist /nh /fi "pid eq %1" 2>nul | find "%1" >nul
if %ERRORLEVEL%==0 (
    timeout /t 5 /nobreak >nul
    goto :waitforpid
) else (
    wmic process where processid="%2" call terminate >nul
)""")
        except:
            pass
        
        # After this spawns we're pretty safe. There is a race, but we do what we can.
        subprocess.Popen(
            ['.process_watchdog_helper.bat', str(os.getpid()), str(process.pid)],
            stdout=subprocess.DEVNULL,
            stderr=subprocess.DEVNULL
        )

# example
class DummyProcess:
    def __init__(self, pid):
        self.pid = pid
set_terminate_when_this_process_dies(DummyProcess(7516))