Ensuring subprocesses are dead on exiting Python program

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().

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

You can use atexit for this, and register any clean up tasks to be run when your program exits.

atexit.register(func[, *args[, **kargs]])

In your cleanup process, you can also implement your own wait, and kill it when a your desired timeout occurs.

>>> import atexit
>>> import sys
>>> import time
>>> 
>>> 
>>>
>>> def cleanup():
...     timeout_sec = 5
...     for p in all_processes: # list of your processes
...         p_sec = 0
...         for second in range(timeout_sec):
...             if p.poll() == None:
...                 time.sleep(1)
...                 p_sec += 1
...         if p_sec >= timeout_sec:
...             p.kill() # supported from python 2.6
...     print 'cleaned up!'
...
>>>
>>> atexit.register(cleanup)
>>>
>>> sys.exit()
cleaned up!

Note -- Registered functions won't be run if this process (parent process) is killed.

The following windows method is no longer needed for python >= 2.6

Here's a way to kill a process in windows. Your Popen object has a pid attribute, so you can just call it by success = win_kill(p.pid) (Needs pywin32 installed):

    def win_kill(pid):
        '''kill a process by specified PID in windows'''
        import win32api
        import win32con

        hProc = None
        try:
            hProc = win32api.OpenProcess(win32con.PROCESS_TERMINATE, 0, pid)
            win32api.TerminateProcess(hProc, 0)
        except Exception:
            return False
        finally:
            if hProc != None:
                hProc.Close()

        return True

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.

Ensuring subprocesses are dead on exiting Python program

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