How to make child process die after parent exits?

Question

Suppose I have a process which spawns exactly one child process. Now when the parent process exits for whatever reason (normally or abnormally, by kill, ^C, assert failure o

Answer 1

Inspired by another answer here, I came up with the following all-POSIX solution. The general idea is to create an intermediate process between the parent and the child, that has one purpose: Notice when the parent dies, and explicitly kill the child.

This type of solution is useful when the code in the child can't be modified.

int p[2];
pipe(p);
pid_t child = fork();
if (child == 0) {
    close(p[1]); // close write end of pipe
    setpgid(0, 0); // prevent ^C in parent from stopping this process
    child = fork();
    if (child == 0) {
        close(p[0]); // close read end of pipe (don't need it here)
        exec(...child process here...);
        exit(1);
    }
    read(p[0], 1); // returns when parent exits for any reason
    kill(child, 9);
    exit(1);
}

There are two small caveats with this method:

• If you deliberately kill the intermediate process, then the child won't be killed when the parent dies.
• If the child exits before the parent, then the intermediate process will try to kill the original child pid, which could now refer to a different process. (This could be fixed with more code in the intermediate process.)

As an aside, the actual code I'm using is in Python. Here it is for completeness:

def run(*args):
    (r, w) = os.pipe()
    child = os.fork()
    if child == 0:
        os.close(w)
        os.setpgid(0, 0)
        child = os.fork()
        if child == 0:
            os.close(r)
            os.execl(args[0], *args)
            os._exit(1)
        os.read(r, 1)
        os.kill(child, 9)
        os._exit(1)
    os.close(r)