ctrl+c to kill a bash script with child processes - linux

I have a script whose internals boil down to:
trap "exit" SIGINT SIGTERM
while :
do
mplayer sound.mp3
sleep 3
done
(yes, it is a bit more meaningful than the above, but that's not relevant to the problem). Several instances of the script may be running at the same time.
Sometimes I want to ^C the script... but that does not succeed. As I understand, when ^C kills mplayer, it continues to sleep, and when ^C kills sleep, it continues to mplayer, and I never happen to catch it in between. As I understand, trap just never works.
How do I terminate the script?

You can get the PID of mplayer and upon trapping send the kill signal to mplayer's PID.
function clean_up {
# Perform program exit housekeeping
KILL $MPLAYER_PID
exit
}
trap clean_up SIGHUP SIGINT SIGTERM
mplayer sound.mp3 &
MPLAYER_PID=$!
wait $MPLAYER_PID

mplayer returns 1 when it is stopped with Ctrl-C so:
mplayer sound.mp3 || break
will do the work.
One issue of this method is that if mplayer exits 1 for another reason (i.e., sound file has a bad format), it will exit anyway, and it's maybe not the desired behaviour.

Related

`trap`-ing Linux Signals - SIGSTOP?

The Docker docs note the following (w/ code) on how to run clean up upon a container's shutdown:
Lastly, if you need to do some extra cleanup ... on shutdown, ..., you
may need to ensure that the ENTRYPOINT script receives the Unix
signals, passes them on, and then does some more work
#!/bin/sh
trap "echo TRAPed signal" HUP INT QUIT KILL TERM
/usr/sbin/apachectl start
I think that this trap will catch a KILL signal. However, I read in this post:
All signals except for SIGKILL and SIGSTOP can be intercepted by the process.
However, another post states:
There is one signal that you cannot trap: SIGKILL or signal 9.
Which is it?
You cannot catch SIGSTOP. The page you referenced was mistaken.
Yes, the above script tries to catch the KILL signal. It fails. You can verify this yourself quite easily with the following script:
#!/bin/sh
echo "Running shell in pid $$"
trap "echo TRAPed signal" HUP INT QUIT KILL TERM STOP
sleep 20
Try sending it the KILL and STOP signals, you will see that the process dies and halts, respectively, without the message being printed. If you try any other caught signal, you will see those are handled as expected.

How to kill a process by its pid in linux

I'm new in linux and I'm building a program that receives the name of a process, gets its PID (i have no problem with that part) and then pass the PID to the kill command but its not working. It goes something like this:
read -p "Process to kill: " proceso
proid= pidof $proceso
echo "$proid"
kill $proid
Can someone tell me why it isn't killing it ? I know that there are some other ways to do it, even with the PID, but none of them seems to work for me. I believe it's some kind of problem with the Bash language (which I just started learning).
Instead of this:
proid= pidof $proceso
You probably meant this:
proid=$(pidof $proceso)
Even so,
the program might not get killed.
By default, kill PID sends the TERM signal to the specified process,
giving it a chance to shut down in an orderly manner,
for example clean up resources it's using.
The strongest signal to send a process to kill without graceful cleanup is KILL, using kill -KILL PID or kill -9 PID.
I believe it's some kind of problem with the bash language (which I just started learning).
The original line you posted, proid= pidof $proceso should raise an error,
and Bash would print an error message about it.
Debugging problems starts by reading and understanding the error messages the software is trying to tell you.
kill expects you to tell it **how to kill*, so there must be 64 different ways to kill your process :) They have names and numbers. The most lethal is -9. Some interesting ones include:
SIGKILL - The SIGKILL (also -9) signal forces the process to stop executing immediately. The program cannot ignore this signal. This process does not get to clean-up either.
SIGHUP - The SIGHUP signal disconnects a process from the parent process. This an also be used to restart processes. For example, "killall -SIGUP compiz" will restart Compiz. This is useful for daemons with memory leaks.
SIGINT - This signal is the same as pressing ctrl-c. On some systems, "delete" + "break" sends the same signal to the process. The process is interrupted and stopped. However, the process can ignore this signal.
SIGQUIT - This is like SIGINT with the ability to make the process produce a core dump.
use the following command to display the port and PID of the process:
sudo netstat -plten
AND THEN
kill -9 PID
Here is an example to kill a process running on port 8283 and has PID=25334
You have to send the SIGKILL flag with the kill statement.
kill -9 [pid]
If you don't the operating system will choose to kill the process at its convenience, SIGKILL (-9) will tell the os to kill the process NOW without ignoring the command until later.
Try this
kill -9
It will kill any process with PID given in brackets
Try "kill -9 $proid" or "kill -SIGKILL $proid" commands. If you want more information, click.
Based on what you have there, it looks like you aren't getting the actual PID in your proid variable. If you want to capture the output of pidof, you will need to enclose that command in backtics for the old form of command substitution ...
proid=`pidof $proceso`
... or like so for the new form of command substitution.
proid=$(pidof $proceso)
I had a similar problem, only wanting to run monitor (Video surveillance) for several hours a day.
Wrote two sh scripts;
cat startmotion.sh
#!/bin/sh
motion -c /home/username/.config/motion/motion.conf
And the second;
cat killmotion.sh
#!/bin/sh
OA=$(cat /var/run/motion/motion.pid)
kill -9 $OA
These were called from crontab at the scheduled time
ctontab -e
0 15 * * * /home/username/startmotion.sh
0 17 * * * /home/username/killmotion.sh
Very simple, but that's all I needed.

Signal handling in a shell script

Following is a shell script (myscript.sh) I have:
#!/bin/bash
sleep 500 &
Aprogram arg1 arg2 # Aprogram is a program which runs for an hour.
echo "done"
I launched this in one terminal, and from another terminal I issued 'kill -INT 12345'. 12345 is the pid of myscript.sh.
After a while I can see that both myscript.sh and Aprogram have been dead. However 'sleep 500 &' is still running.
Can anyone explain why is this behavior?
Also, when I issued SIGINT signal to the 'myscript.sh' what exactly is happening? Why is 'Aprogram' getting killed and why not 'sleep' ? How is the signal INT getting transmitted to it's child processes?
You need to use trap to catch signals:
To just ignore SIGINT use:
trap '' 2
if you want to specify some special action for this you can make it that in line:
trap 'some commands here' 2
or better wrap it into a function
function do_for_sigint() {
...
}
trap 'do_for_sigint' 2
and if you wish to allow your script to finish all it's tasks first:
keep_running="yes"
trap 'keep_running="no"' 2
while [ $keep_running=="yes" ]; do
# main body of your script here
done
You start sleep in the background. As such, it is not killed when you kill the script.
If you want to kill sleep too when the script is terminated, you'd need to trap it.
sleep 500 &
sid=($!) # Capture the PID of sleep
trap "kill ${sid[#]}" INT # Define handler for SIGINT
Aprogram arg1 arg2 & # Aprogram is a program which runs for an hour.
sid+=($!)
echo "done"
Now sending SIGINT to your script would cause sleep to terminate as well.
After a while I can see that both myscript.sh and Aprogram have been dead. However 'sleep 500 &' is still running.
As soon as Aprogram is finished myscript.sh prints "Done" and is also finised. sleep 500 gets process with PID 1 as a parent. That is it.
Can anyone explain why is this behavior?
SIGINT is not deliverd to Aprogram when myscript.sh gets it. Use strace to make sure that Aprogram does not receive a signal.
Also, when I issued SIGINT signal to the 'myscript.sh' what exactly is happening?
I first thought that it is the situation like when a user presses Ctrl-C and read this http://www.cons.org/cracauer/sigint.html. But it is not exactly the same situation. In your case shell received SIGINT but the child process didn't. However, shell had at that moment a child process and it did not do anything and kept waiting for a child. This is strace output on my computer after sending SIGINT to a shell script waiting for a child process:
>strace -p 30484
Process 30484 attached - interrupt to quit
wait4(-1, 0x7fffc0cd9abc, 0, NULL) = ? ERESTARTSYS (To be restarted)
--- SIGINT (Interrupt) # 0 (0) ---
rt_sigreturn(0x2) = -1 EINTR (Interrupted system call)
wait4(-1,
Why is 'Aprogram' getting killed and why not 'sleep' ? How is the signal INT getting transmitted to it's child processes?
As far as I can see with strace a child program like your Aprogram is not getting killed. It did not receive SIGINT and finished normally. As soon as it finished your shell script also finished.

Bash script: can not properly handle SIGTSTP

I have a bash script that mounts and unmounts a device, which performing some read operations in between. Since the device is very slow, the script takes about 15 seconds to complete (the mount taking atleast 5-6 seconds). Since leaving this device mounted can cause other problems, I don't want this script to be interrupted.
Having said that, I can correctly handle SIGINT (Ctrl+c), but when I try to handle SIGTSTP (Ctrl+z), the script freezes. Which means the signal is trapped but the handler doesn't run.
#!/bin/sh
cleanup()
{
# Don't worry about unmounting yet. Just checking if trap works.
echo "Quitting..." > /dev/tty
exit 0
}
trap 'cleanup' SIGTSTP
...
I manually have to send the KILL signal to the process. Any idea why this is happening and how I can fix it?
The shell does not execute the trap until the currently executing process terminates. (at least, that is the behavior of bash 3.00.15). If you send SIGINT via ^c, it is sent to all processes in the foreground process group; if the program currently executing receives it and terminates then bash can execute the trap. Similarly with SIGTSTP via ^z; bash receives the signal but does not execute the trap until the program that was being run terminates, which it does not do if it takes the default behavior and is suspended. Try replacing ... with a simple read f and note that the trap executes immediately.

How to make sure that a process was killed? (using kill command)

I try to kill a process with the kill command in linux. (not using -9 as argument)
I need to make sure that the process is really killed.
As far as I know, the kill command runs asynchronously and it can take some time till it is finished.
I need to make sure, after I run the kill that my process has died using bash
Can you please assist?
Thanks!!!
Killing a process with signal 0 will check if the process is still running, and not actually kill it. Just check the return code.
Assuming $PID holds the pid of your process, you could do something like this:
kill "$PID"
while [ $(kill -0 "$PID") ]; do
sleep 1
done
echo "Process is killed"
kill is used to send signals to processes. It doesn't necessarily terminate the process (but usually do). kill without explicitly mentioned signal will send SIGTERM to the process. The default action on SIGTERM is to terminate process but process can setup a different signal handler and process might not be terminated.
What, I think you need, is a way to find if the process has handled the signal or not. This can be done using ps s $PID. If this shows 0s as pending mask, the process has received the signal and processed it.

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