How to Reliably Kill Child Processes When a Go Parent Process Exits?

Killing Child Executables in Go Processes

When running multiple threads in Go that execute separate executables, ensuring the termination of these child processes upon the termination of the parent Go process becomes crucial. This article addresses this issue by exploring the available methods to achieve this goal.

Method 1: Process Group

One approach is to start the child process in the same process group as the parent Go process. By doing so, when the parent process receives a kill signal (e.g., SIGKILL or SIGINT), the entire process group, including the child executable, is terminated.

Method 2: Pdeathsig Attribute

The Pdeathsig attribute within the syscall.SetProcAttr function allows you to specify a signal that will be sent to the child process when its parent process terminates. By setting this attribute to a termination signal (e.g., syscall.SIGTERM), the child process will be signaled to exit when the parent Go process exits.

Signal Handling

While not guaranteed to be effective with SIG_KILL, you can establish a signal handler for common signals like SIG_INT and SIG_TERM. Within this handler, you can manually terminate the child processes using syscall.Kill or cmd.Process.Kill.

Example Code:

The following code sample demonstrates the use of Pdeathsig to ensure the termination of a child process:

cmd := exec.Command("./long-process")
cmd.SysProcAttr = &syscall.SysProcAttr{
    Pdeathsig: syscall.SIGTERM,
}

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