How to terminate a python subprocess launched with shell=True

Question

I\'m launching a subprocess with the following command:

p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)

However, when I try t

Answer 1

I have not seen this mentioned here, so I am putting it out there in case someone needs it. If all you want to do is to make sure that your subprocess terminates successfully, you could put it in a context manager. For example, I wanted my standard printer to print an out image and using the context manager ensured that the subprocess terminated.

import subprocess

with open(filename,'rb') as f:
    img=f.read()
with subprocess.Popen("/usr/bin/lpr", stdin=subprocess.PIPE) as lpr:
    lpr.stdin.write(img)
print('Printed image...')

I believe this method is also cross-platform.

Answer 2

If you can use psutil, then this works perfectly:

import subprocess

import psutil


def kill(proc_pid):
    process = psutil.Process(proc_pid)
    for proc in process.children(recursive=True):
        proc.kill()
    process.kill()


proc = subprocess.Popen(["infinite_app", "param"], shell=True)
try:
    proc.wait(timeout=3)
except subprocess.TimeoutExpired:
    kill(proc.pid)

Answer 3

I could do it using

from subprocess import Popen

process = Popen(command, shell=True)
Popen("TASKKILL /F /PID {pid} /T".format(pid=process.pid))

it killed the cmd.exe and the program that i gave the command for.

(On Windows)

Answer 4

what i feel like we could use:

import os
import signal
import subprocess
p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)

os.killpg(os.getpgid(pro.pid), signal.SIGINT)

this will not kill all your task but the process with the p.pid

Answer 5

When shell=True the shell is the child process, and the commands are its children. So any SIGTERM or SIGKILL will kill the shell but not its child processes, and I don't remember a good way to do it. The best way I can think of is to use shell=False, otherwise when you kill the parent shell process, it will leave a defunct shell process.

Answer 6

Use a process group so as to enable sending a signal to all the process in the groups. For that, you should attach a session id to the parent process of the spawned/child processes, which is a shell in your case. This will make it the group leader of the processes. So now, when a signal is sent to the process group leader, it's transmitted to all of the child processes of this group.

Here's the code:

import os
import signal
import subprocess

# The os.setsid() is passed in the argument preexec_fn so
# it's run after the fork() and before  exec() to run the shell.
pro = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, 
                       shell=True, preexec_fn=os.setsid) 

os.killpg(os.getpgid(pro.pid), signal.SIGTERM)  # Send the signal to all the process groups