UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

hi

OS: Sun Solaris

I have a scenario that when someone presses ctrl-c while executing a shell script, it should not just exit. it should kill all the child processes started by the running shell script only.

I am executing many other scripts parallely which in turn fork off more processes.

I tried

Code:

ps -ef | grep <processname> | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

but it will kill not only the processes started by the running script but also the other processes.

please help me out.

Thank you.

You can track in a file or in an array all the PIDs of the background processes started by the main script ($!) and kill all of them when SIGINT is received.

Look at this example shell script to get an idea:

Code:

trap 'kill_em_all' 2

kill_em_all() {
   echo "Kill 'em all!"
   kill -9 `cat /tmp/kill.lst`
}

sleep 40 &
echo $!  > /tmp/kill.lst
sleep 50 &
echo $! >> /tmp/kill.lst
sleep 60 &
echo $! >> /tmp/kill.lst

wait

As a side note, unless you are really sure you know what you are doing, you should avoid kill -9 -- google for "useless use of kill -9"