Use only one "kill" to kill father and child processes
 

Hi!

Is there a way to kill a bash process so it will automatically kill all the programs that it initiated?

Currently I trap the signal in the bash process and kill each program individually, but I was wondering if there is an easier way.

Thanks for the help,

Xosen.

try killall {application_name}

You can run
setsid <your_program>
setsid will create new process group

Then instead of
kill PID
you can use
kill -- -PID
to kill all processes in the group

You don’t necessarily need to use setsid, as an interactive bash process is already its own session leader. In fact, if this is in a bash script, all you need to do is
which should kill all processes with the same PGID (most likely all its children). Only those children which have deliberately joined a separate process group (through e.g., setsid) will not receive the signal.

I was under impression, that it's needed for kill bash script (i.e non-interactive bash) and all processes that this script invoked and that it's done from another shell.

But kill 0 is nice. I never though about it.

When called in the usual way (from an interactive shell prompt), a non-interactive script is the group leader. So if your script looks like:
And you execute it at a terminal,
Then you can use another shell to do
Then everything works as expected and the setsid is unnecessary.

If, however, you are running a (non-shell) program or script that launches your script, then it may be necessary, as
or even
from inside the test.sh will kill all processes with that PGID (most likely including the parent).

Note, however, that killing by group pid is not a strict parent-child relationship. For example, in the following script, the last sleep does not die with “kill -- -${PGID_of_test.sh}”:
If you want to kill all a script’s direct descendants, you can use pkill:
Also note that pkill, pgrep, and setsid are utilities found normally on linux distributions, but might not be available on other unices.

setsid actually prevents the creation of a new process group because it creates a new session. The process' group is implicitly it's own pid, though. setsid will also interfere with the way a shell normally shuts down its children. For example, try the following from a terminal emulator in KDE:Next, close the terminal (which will signal the shell to terminate.) Notice which instance of kate is still open and which isn't.
ta0kira

I have done some test and this works the best. Thanks a lot for all the help.

Xosen.