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

Even though 7 years have passed I've just run into this issue as I'm running SpringBoot application that needs to start webpack-dev-server during development and needs to kill it when the backend process stops.

I try to use Runtime.getRuntime().addShutdownHook but it worked on Windows 10 but not on Windows 7.

I've change it to use a dedicated thread that waits for the process to quit or for InterruptedException which seems to work correctly on both Windows versions.

private void startWebpackDevServer() {
    String cmd = isWindows() ? "cmd /c gradlew webPackStart" : "gradlew webPackStart";
    logger.info("webpack dev-server " + cmd);

    Thread thread = new Thread(() -> {

        ProcessBuilder pb = new ProcessBuilder(cmd.split(" "));
        pb.redirectOutput(ProcessBuilder.Redirect.INHERIT);
        pb.redirectError(ProcessBuilder.Redirect.INHERIT);
        pb.directory(new File("."));

        Process process = null;
        try {
            // Start the node process
            process = pb.start();

            // Wait for the node process to quit (blocking)
            process.waitFor();

            // Ensure the node process is killed
            process.destroyForcibly();
            System.setProperty(WEBPACK_SERVER_PROPERTY, "true");
        } catch (InterruptedException | IOException e) {
            // Ensure the node process is killed.
            // InterruptedException is thrown when the main process exit.
            logger.info("killing webpack dev-server", e);
            if (process != null) {
                process.destroyForcibly();
            }
        }

    });

    thread.start();
}