How to make child process die after parent exits? - c

Question

Suppose I have a process which spawns exactly one child process. Now when the parent process exits for whatever reason (normally or abnormally, by kill, ^C, assert failure or anything else) I want the child process to die. How to do that correctly?
Some similar question on stackoverflow:
(asked earlier) How can I cause a child process to exit when the parent does?
(asked later) Are child processes created with fork() automatically killed when the parent is killed?
Some similar question on stackoverflow for Windows:
How do I automatically destroy child processes in Windows?
Kill child process when parent process is killed

Answer 1

Child can ask kernel to deliver SIGHUP (or other signal) when parent dies by specifying option PR_SET_PDEATHSIG in prctl() syscall like this:
prctl(PR_SET_PDEATHSIG, SIGHUP);
See man 2 prctl for details.
Edit: This is Linux-only

Answer 2

I'm trying to solve the same problem, and since my program must run on OS X, the Linux-only solution didn't work for me.
I came to the same conclusion as the other people on this page -- there isn't a POSIX-compatible way of notifying a child when a parent dies. So I kludged up the next-best thing -- having the child poll.
When a parent process dies (for any reason) the child's parent process becomes process 1. If the child simply polls periodically, it can check if its parent is 1. If it is, the child should exit.
This isn't great, but it works, and it's easier than the TCP socket/lockfile polling solutions suggested elsewhere on this page.

Answer 3

I have achieved this in the past by running the "original" code in the "child" and the "spawned" code in the "parent" (that is: you reverse the usual sense of the test after fork()). Then trap SIGCHLD in the "spawned" code...
May not be possible in your case, but cute when it works.

Answer 4

Under Linux, you can install a parent death signal in the child, e.g.:
#include <sys/prctl.h> // prctl(), PR_SET_PDEATHSIG
#include <signal.h> // signals
#include <unistd.h> // fork()
#include <stdio.h> // perror()
// ...
pid_t ppid_before_fork = getpid();
pid_t pid = fork();
if (pid == -1) { perror(0); exit(1); }
if (pid) {
; // continue parent execution
} else {
int r = prctl(PR_SET_PDEATHSIG, SIGTERM);
if (r == -1) { perror(0); exit(1); }
// test in case the original parent exited just
// before the prctl() call
if (getppid() != ppid_before_fork)
exit(1);
// continue child execution ...
Note that storing the parent process id before the fork and testing it in the child after prctl() eliminates a race condition between prctl() and the exit of the process that called the child.
Also note that the parent death signal of the child is cleared in newly created children of its own. It is not affected by an execve().
That test can be simplified if we are certain that the system process who is in charge of adopting all orphans has PID 1:
pid_t pid = fork();
if (pid == -1) { perror(0); exit(1); }
if (pid) {
; // continue parent execution
} else {
int r = prctl(PR_SET_PDEATHSIG, SIGTERM);
if (r == -1) { perror(0); exit(1); }
// test in case the original parent exited just
// before the prctl() call
if (getppid() == 1)
exit(1);
// continue child execution ...
Relying on that system process being init and having PID 1 isn't portable, though. POSIX.1-2008 specifies:
The parent process ID of all of the existing child processes and zombie processes of the calling process shall be set to the process ID of an implementation-defined system process. That is, these processes shall be inherited by a special system process.
Traditionally, the system process adopting all orphans is PID 1, i.e. init - which is the ancestor of all processes.
On modern systems like Linux or FreeBSD another process might have that role. For example, on Linux, a process can call prctl(PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER, 1) to establish itself as system process that inherits all orphans of any of its descendants (cf. an example on Fedora 25).

Answer 5

If you're unable to modify the child process, you can try something like the following:
int pipes[2];
pipe(pipes)
if (fork() == 0) {
close(pipes[1]); /* Close the writer end in the child*/
dup2(pipes[0], STDIN_FILENO); /* Use reader end as stdin (fixed per  maxschlepzig */
exec("sh -c 'set -o monitor; child_process & read dummy; kill %1'")
}
close(pipes[0]); /* Close the reader end in the parent */
This runs the child from within a shell process with job control enabled. The child process is spawned in the background. The shell waits for a newline (or an EOF) then kills the child.
When the parent dies--no matter what the reason--it will close its end of the pipe. The child shell will get an EOF from the read and proceed to kill the backgrounded child process.

Answer 6

For completeness sake. On macOS you can use kqueue:
void noteProcDeath(
CFFileDescriptorRef fdref,
CFOptionFlags callBackTypes,
void* info)
{
// LOG_DEBUG(#"noteProcDeath... ");
struct kevent kev;
int fd = CFFileDescriptorGetNativeDescriptor(fdref);
kevent(fd, NULL, 0, &kev, 1, NULL);
// take action on death of process here
unsigned int dead_pid = (unsigned int)kev.ident;
CFFileDescriptorInvalidate(fdref);
CFRelease(fdref); // the CFFileDescriptorRef is no longer of any use in this example
int our_pid = getpid();
// when our parent dies we die as well..
LOG_INFO(#"exit! parent process (pid %u) died. no need for us (pid %i) to stick around", dead_pid, our_pid);
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
void suicide_if_we_become_a_zombie(int parent_pid) {
// int parent_pid = getppid();
// int our_pid = getpid();
// LOG_ERROR(#"suicide_if_we_become_a_zombie(). parent process (pid %u) that we monitor. our pid %i", parent_pid, our_pid);
int fd = kqueue();
struct kevent kev;
EV_SET(&kev, parent_pid, EVFILT_PROC, EV_ADD|EV_ENABLE, NOTE_EXIT, 0, NULL);
kevent(fd, &kev, 1, NULL, 0, NULL);
CFFileDescriptorRef fdref = CFFileDescriptorCreate(kCFAllocatorDefault, fd, true, noteProcDeath, NULL);
CFFileDescriptorEnableCallBacks(fdref, kCFFileDescriptorReadCallBack);
CFRunLoopSourceRef source = CFFileDescriptorCreateRunLoopSource(kCFAllocatorDefault, fdref, 0);
CFRunLoopAddSource(CFRunLoopGetMain(), source, kCFRunLoopDefaultMode);
CFRelease(source);
}

Answer 7

Inspired by another answer here, I came up with the following all-POSIX solution. The general idea is to create an intermediate process between the parent and the child, that has one purpose: Notice when the parent dies, and explicitly kill the child.
This type of solution is useful when the code in the child can't be modified.
int p[2];
pipe(p);
pid_t child = fork();
if (child == 0) {
close(p[1]); // close write end of pipe
setpgid(0, 0); // prevent ^C in parent from stopping this process
child = fork();
if (child == 0) {
close(p[0]); // close read end of pipe (don't need it here)
exec(...child process here...);
exit(1);
}
read(p[0], 1); // returns when parent exits for any reason
kill(child, 9);
exit(1);
}
There are two small caveats with this method:
If you deliberately kill the intermediate process, then the child won't be killed when the parent dies.
If the child exits before the parent, then the intermediate process will try to kill the original child pid, which could now refer to a different process. (This could be fixed with more code in the intermediate process.)
As an aside, the actual code I'm using is in Python. Here it is for completeness:
def run(*args):
(r, w) = os.pipe()
child = os.fork()
if child == 0:
os.close(w)
os.setpgid(0, 0)
child = os.fork()
if child == 0:
os.close(r)
os.execl(args[0], *args)
os._exit(1)
os.read(r, 1)
os.kill(child, 9)
os._exit(1)
os.close(r)

Answer 8

Does the child process have a pipe to/from the parent process? If so, you'd receive a SIGPIPE if writing, or get EOF when reading - these conditions could be detected.

Answer 9

I don't believe it's possible to guarantee that using only standard POSIX calls. Like real life, once a child is spawned, it has a life of its own.
It is possible for the parent process to catch most possible termination events, and attempt to kill the child process at that point, but there's always some that can't be caught.
For example, no process can catch a SIGKILL. When the kernel handles this signal it will kill the specified process with no notification to that process whatsoever.
To extend the analogy - the only other standard way of doing it is for the child to commit suicide when it finds that it no longer has a parent.
There is a Linux-only way of doing it with prctl(2) - see other answers.

Answer 10

This solution worked for me:
Pass stdin pipe to child - you don't have to write any data into the stream.
Child reads indefinitely from stdin until EOF. An EOF signals that the parent has gone.
This is foolproof and portable way to detect when the parent has gone. Even if parent crashes, OS will close the pipe.
This was for a worker-type process whose existence only made sense when the parent was alive.

Answer 11

Some posters have already mentioned pipes and kqueue. In fact you can also create a pair of connected Unix domain sockets by the socketpair() call. The socket type should be SOCK_STREAM.
Let us suppose you have the two socket file descriptors fd1, fd2. Now fork() to create the child process, which will inherit the fds. In the parent you close fd2 and in the child you close fd1. Now each process can poll() the remaining open fd on its own end for the POLLIN event. As long as each side doesn't explicitly close() its fd during normal lifetime, you can be fairly sure that a POLLHUP flag should indicate the other's termination (no matter clean or not). Upon notified of this event, the child can decide what to do (e.g. to die).
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <poll.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
int sv[2]; /* sv[0] for parent, sv[1] for child */
socketpair(AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, 0, sv);
pid_t pid = fork();
if ( pid > 0 ) { /* parent */
close(sv[1]);
fprintf(stderr, "parent: pid = %d\n", getpid());
sleep(100);
exit(0);
} else { /* child */
close(sv[0]);
fprintf(stderr, "child: pid = %d\n", getpid());
struct pollfd mon;
mon.fd = sv[1];
mon.events = POLLIN;
poll(&mon, 1, -1);
if ( mon.revents & POLLHUP )
fprintf(stderr, "child: parent hung up\n");
exit(0);
}
}
You can try compiling the above proof-of-concept code, and run it in a terminal like ./a.out &. You have roughly 100 seconds to experiment with killing the parent PID by various signals, or it will simply exit. In either case, you should see the message "child: parent hung up".
Compared with the method using SIGPIPE handler, this method doesn't require trying the write() call.
This method is also symmetric, i.e. the processes can use the same channel to monitor each other's existence.
This solution calls only the POSIX functions. I tried this in Linux and FreeBSD. I think it should work on other Unixes but I haven't really tested.
See also:
unix(7) of Linux man pages, unix(4) for FreeBSD, poll(2), socketpair(2), socket(7) on Linux.

Answer 12

Install a trap handler to catch SIGINT, which kills off your child process if it's still alive, though other posters are correct that it won't catch SIGKILL.
Open a .lockfile with exclusive access and have the child poll on it trying to open it - if the open succeeds, the child process should exit

Answer 13

As other people have pointed out, relying on the parent pid to become 1 when the parent exits is non-portable. Instead of waiting for a specific parent process ID, just wait for the ID to change:
pit_t pid = getpid();
switch (fork())
{
case -1:
{
abort(); /* or whatever... */
}
default:
{
/* parent */
exit(0);
}
case 0:
{
/* child */
/* ... */
}
}
/* Wait for parent to exit */
while (getppid() != pid)
;
Add a micro-sleep as desired if you don't want to poll at full speed.
This option seems simpler to me than using a pipe or relying on signals.

Answer 14

I think a quick and dirty way is to create a pipe between child and parent. When parent exits, children will receive a SIGPIPE.

Answer 15

Another way to do this that is Linux specific is to have the parent be created in a new PID namespace. It will then be PID 1 in that namespace, and when it exits it all of it's children will be immediately killed with SIGKILL.
Unfortunately, in order to create a new PID namespace you have to have CAP_SYS_ADMIN. But, this method is very effective and requires no real change to the parent or the children beyond the initial launch of the parent.
See clone(2), pid_namespaces(7), and unshare(2).

Answer 16

Under POSIX, the exit(), _exit() and _Exit() functions are defined to:
If the process is a controlling process, the SIGHUP signal shall be sent to each process in the foreground process group of the controlling terminal belonging to the calling process.
So, if you arrange for the parent process to be a controlling process for its process group, the child should get a SIGHUP signal when the parent exits. I'm not absolutely sure that happens when the parent crashes, but I think it does. Certainly, for the non-crash cases, it should work fine.
Note that you may have to read quite a lot of fine print - including the Base Definitions (Definitions) section, as well as the System Services information for exit() and setsid() and setpgrp() - to get the complete picture. (So would I!)

Answer 17

If you send a signal to the pid 0, using for instance
kill(0, 2); /* SIGINT */
that signal is sent to the entire process group, thus effectively killing the child.
You can test it easily with something like:
(cat && kill 0) | python
If you then press ^D, you'll see the text "Terminated" as an indication that the Python interpreter have indeed been killed, instead of just exited because of stdin being closed.

Answer 18

In case it is relevant to anyone else, when I spawn JVM instances in forked child processes from C++, the only way I could get the JVM instances to terminate properly after the parent process completed was to do the following. Hopefully someone can provide feedback in the comments if this wasn't the best way to do this.
1) Call prctl(PR_SET_PDEATHSIG, SIGHUP) on the forked child process as suggested before launching the Java app via execv, and
2) Add a shutdown hook to the Java application that polls until its parent PID equals 1, then do a hard Runtime.getRuntime().halt(0). The polling is done by launching a separate shell that runs the ps command (See: How do I find my PID in Java or JRuby on Linux?).
EDIT 130118:
It seems that was not a robust solution. I'm still struggling a bit to understand the nuances of what's going on, but I was still sometimes getting orphan JVM processes when running these applications in screen/SSH sessions.
Instead of polling for the PPID in the Java app, I simply had the shutdown hook perform cleanup followed by a hard halt as above. Then I made sure to invoke waitpid in the C++ parent app on the spawned child process when it was time to terminate everything. This seems to be a more robust solution, as the child process ensures that it terminates, while the parent uses existing references to make sure that its children terminate. Compare this to the previous solution which had the parent process terminate whenever it pleased, and had the children try to figure out if they had been orphaned before terminating.

Answer 19

I found 2 solutions, both not perfect.
1.Kill all children by kill(-pid) when received SIGTERM signal.
Obviously, this solution can not handle "kill -9", but it do work for most case and very simple because it need not to remember all child processes.
var childProc = require('child_process').spawn('tail', ['-f', '/dev/null'], {stdio:'ignore'});
var counter=0;
setInterval(function(){
console.log('c '+(++counter));
},1000);
if (process.platform.slice(0,3) != 'win') {
function killMeAndChildren() {
/*
* On Linux/Unix(Include Mac OS X), kill (-pid) will kill process group, usually
* the process itself and children.
* On Windows, an JOB object has been applied to current process and children,
* so all children will be terminated if current process dies by anyway.
*/
console.log('kill process group');
process.kill(-process.pid, 'SIGKILL');
}
/*
* When you use "kill pid_of_this_process", this callback will be called
*/
process.on('SIGTERM', function(err){
console.log('SIGTERM');
killMeAndChildren();
});
}
By same way, you can install 'exit' handler like above way if you call process.exit somewhere.
Note: Ctrl+C and sudden crash have automatically been processed by OS to kill process group, so no more here.
2.Use chjj/pty.js to spawn your process with controlling terminal attached.
When you kill current process by anyway even kill -9, all child processes will be automatically killed too (by OS?). I guess that because current process hold another side of the terminal, so if current process dies, the child process will get SIGPIPE so dies.
var pty = require('pty.js');
//var term =
pty.spawn('any_child_process', [/*any arguments*/], {
name: 'xterm-color',
cols: 80,
rows: 30,
cwd: process.cwd(),
env: process.env
});
/*optionally you can install data handler
term.on('data', function(data) {
process.stdout.write(data);
});
term.write(.....);
*/

Answer 20

Even though 7 years have passed I've just run into this issue as I'm running SpringBoot application that needs to start webpack-dev-server during development and needs to kill it when the backend process stops.
I try to use Runtime.getRuntime().addShutdownHook but it worked on Windows 10 but not on Windows 7.
I've change it to use a dedicated thread that waits for the process to quit or for InterruptedException which seems to work correctly on both Windows versions.
private void startWebpackDevServer() {
String cmd = isWindows() ? "cmd /c gradlew webPackStart" : "gradlew webPackStart";
logger.info("webpack dev-server " + cmd);
Thread thread = new Thread(() -> {
ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder(cmd.split(" "));
pb.redirectOutput(ProcessBuilder.Redirect.INHERIT);
pb.redirectError(ProcessBuilder.Redirect.INHERIT);
pb.directory(new File("."));
Process process = null;
try {
// Start the node process
process = pb.start();
// Wait for the node process to quit (blocking)
process.waitFor();
// Ensure the node process is killed
process.destroyForcibly();
System.setProperty(WEBPACK_SERVER_PROPERTY, "true");
} catch (InterruptedException | IOException e) {
// Ensure the node process is killed.
// InterruptedException is thrown when the main process exit.
logger.info("killing webpack dev-server", e);
if (process != null) {
process.destroyForcibly();
}
}
});
thread.start();
}

Answer 21

Historically, from UNIX v7, the process system has detected orphanity of processes by checking a process' parent id. As I say, historically, the init(8) system process is a special process by only one reason: It cannot die. It cannot die because the kernel algorithm to deal with assigning a new parent process id, depends on this fact. when a process executes its exit(2) call (by means of a process system call or by external task as sending it a signal or the like) the kernel reassigns all children of this process the id of the init process as their parent process id. This leads to the most easy test, and most portable way of knowing if a process has got orphan. Just check the result of the getppid(2) system call and if it is the process id of the init(2) process then the process got orphan before the system call.
Two issues emerge from this approach that can lead to issues:
first, we have the possibility of changing the init process to any user process, so How can we assure that the init process will always be parent of all orphan processes? Well, in the exit system call code there's a explicit check to see if the process executing the call is the init process (the process with pid equal to 1) and if that's the case, the kernel panics (It should not be able anymore to maintain the process hierarchy) so it is not permitted for the init process to do an exit(2) call.
second, there's a race condition in the basic test exposed above. Init process' id is assumed historically to be 1, but that's not warranted by the POSIX approach, that states (as exposed in other response) that only a system's process id is reserved for that purpose. Almost no posix implementation does this, and you can assume in original unix derived systems that having 1 as response of getppid(2) system call is enough to assume the process is orphan. Another way to check is to make a getppid(2) just after the fork and compare that value with the result of a new call. This simply doesn't work in all cases, as both call are not atomic together, and the parent process can die after the fork(2) and before the first getppid(2) system call. The processparent id only changes once, when its parent does anexit(2)call, so this should be enough to check if thegetppid(2)result changed between calls to see that parent process has exit. This test is not valid for the actual children of the init process, because they are always children ofinit(8)`, but you can assume safely these processes as having no parent either (except when you substitute in a system the init process)

Answer 22

I've passed parent pid using environment to the child,
then periodically checked if /proc/$ppid exists from the child.

Answer 23

I managed to do a portable, non-polling solution with 3 processes by abusing terminal control and sessions.
The trick is:
process A is started
process A creates a pipe P (and never reads from it)
process A forks into process B
process B creates a new session
process B allocates a virtual terminal for that new session
process B installs SIGCHLD handler to die when the child exits
process B sets a SIGPIPE handler
process B forks into process C
process C does whatever it needs (e.g. exec()s the unmodified binary or runs whatever logic)
process B writes to pipe P (and blocks that way)
process A wait()s on process B and exits when it dies
That way:
if process A dies: process B gets a SIGPIPE and dies
if process B dies: process A's wait() returns and dies, process C gets a SIGHUP (because when the session leader of a session with a terminal attached dies, all processes in the foreground process group get a SIGHUP)
if process C dies: process B gets a SIGCHLD and dies, so process A dies
Shortcomings:
process C can't handle SIGHUP
process C will be run in a different session
process C can't use session/process group API because it'll break the brittle setup
creating a terminal for every such operation is not the best idea ever

Answer 24

If parent dies, PPID of orphans change to 1 - you only need to check your own PPID.
In a way, this is polling, mentioned above.
here is shell piece for that:
check_parent () {
parent=`ps -f|awk '$2=='$PID'{print $3 }'`
echo "parent:$parent"
let parent=$parent+0
if [[ $parent -eq 1 ]]; then
echo "parent is dead, exiting"
exit;
fi
}
PID=$$
cnt=0
while [[ 1 = 1 ]]; do
check_parent
... something
done