killptree : Kill process tree

Purpose

Kill all processes that are descendants of (i.e. children, grandchildren , great grandchildren etc.) any given process.

Use-case

May be called by handlers of exit traps in shell-scripts for graceful shutdown of background processes such as daemons.

Usage

killptree [-s signal] [-k seconds] [-w] pid # When run as executable

. ./killptree; kill_proc_tree [-s signal] [-k seconds] [-w] pid # When sourced

-s: Pass the signal to be sent. Default: SIGTERM

-k: Pass number of seconds to wait before sending SIGKILL. Default: 0.1

-w: Wait for the descendant processes to be killed before killing the given process. Default: No wait

Example

To kill all processes belonging to a process group as well as their descendants:

pgrep -g "${pid_of_pgroup_leader}" | xargs -n1 killptree

Test

(sleep 100 | (sleep 200 | ( sleep 300 | sleep 400 ) ) ) & pid=$!
ps -ef
killptree $pid
echo Happy?