In Python 2.5, how do I kill a subprocess?

Solution 1:

You call os.kill on the process pid.

os.kill(process.pid, signal.SIGKILL)

You're OK because you're on on Linux. Windows users are out of luck.

Solution 2:

To complete @Gareth's answer, on Windows you do:

import ctypes
PROCESS_TERMINATE = 1
handle = ctypes.windll.kernel32.OpenProcess(PROCESS_TERMINATE, False, theprocess.pid)
ctypes.windll.kernel32.TerminateProcess(handle, -1)
ctypes.windll.kernel32.CloseHandle(handle)

not quite as elegant as os.kill(theprocess.pid, 9), but it does work;-)

Solution 3:

In order to complete @Gareth's and @Alex answers, if you don't want to bother with the underlaying system, you can use psutil.

psutil is a module providing an interface for retrieving information on running processes and system utilization (CPU, memory) in a portable way by using Python, implementing many functionalities offered by command line tools like ps, top, kill and Windows task manager.

It currently supports Linux, OS X, FreeBSD and Windows with Python versions from 2.4 to 3.1 by using a unique code base.