Question

killing a parent process also kills childern ?

Asked by: yzach

I wrote the simplest piece of code, in which a process creates a new one and they both wait for input from the keyboard. Now, when killing the parent process ( by sending it SIGTERM ), the child process is killed too. I can't figure out who kills it and why. Does anyone knows the answer ?

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Asked On
2001-04-16 at 06:39:19ID20106130
Tags

process

Topic

Linux Programming

Participating Experts
5
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50
Comments
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Answers

 

by: SapaPosted on 2001-04-17 at 14:56:54ID: 6015247

man 2 setsid
man 2 setpgrp

- Sapa

 

by: yzachPosted on 2001-04-17 at 22:45:43ID: 6015905

Sapa,
that is not the point. who kills the children ? i.e. - where is the piece of code responsible for it in the kernel ?

 

by: edvinkvPosted on 2001-04-18 at 03:22:13ID: 6016410

do a double fork and exit the middle process.. this will keep the parent and
the child seperate. (the child will be inherited by init) and killing the parent
will not result in the child also exiting.

(the child was also killed in your case because.. they both were sharing the
common address space.)

Cheers.

 

by: SapaPosted on 2001-04-18 at 03:51:04ID: 6016451

yzach:

show your programm code, and the command you have used for sending SIGTERM, please. Signals may be sent to one of these: pgocess, process group, and session leader. If you interested of kernel code, look into /usr/src/linux/kernel/signal.c

- Sapa

edvinkv: double-fork is only a trick to remove process from the current process group. setsid() make the same without additional tricks. The same address space may be shared between different processes in different groups and it take no significance.

- Sapa

 

by: bryanhPosted on 2001-04-25 at 00:12:08ID: 6031134

Is it also possible that killing a session leader (which detaches the controlling terminal from the session) causes all the processes in the session to get a SIGHUP?  SIGHUP is often fatal.  And the session leader is usually the ancestor of all the processes in the session.

I read all this session/process group/controlling terminal stuff in the kernel once, but I don't remember where.  

 

by: yzachPosted on 2001-04-29 at 01:02:30ID: 6038588

brynh,
The SIGHUP signal is only sent to processes that are STOPPED when the parent is killed.

Sapa,
Nowhere in the kernel code is there a place where the child is killed because the parent is killed. Anyway - I could not reproduce this behavior, so it was probably something else.

 

by: bryanhPosted on 2001-04-30 at 20:40:58ID: 6041667

It seemed strange to me that a SIGHUP signal would be sent only to processes that are stopped when the parent terminates, so I took a look at the process exit code, and found out it isn't quite like that.  If any process in a process group is stopped, all the processes in the group get the signal.  They also get a SIGCONT, so if they are stopped, they have a chance to start up and deal with the SIGHUP.  This behavior doesn't make any more sense to me than the other, but that appears to be what it is.

I also discovered that any process group that gets orphaned gets the SIGHUP, and if the exiting process is session leader, it calls disassociate_ctty(), which sends SIGHUPs to the other processes in the session, like I suspected.  disassociate_ctty() is in the tty device driver, drivers/char/tty_io.c.

So considering that a SIGHUP signal often terminates a process (by default, in fact), I think this may be the answer to the question.

 

by: dkloesPosted on 2001-05-17 at 13:13:25ID: 6092650

Depending on what you are doing, it is possible to use nohup to continue running a process if the parent dies.  For example, if you login and run a script with nohup and then logout, the nohup'd process will continue to run.

 

by: jmcgPosted on 2003-11-29 at 21:13:43ID: 9844516

No comment has been added lately, so it's time to clean up this TA.
I will leave the following recommendation for this question in the Cleanup topic area:

SPLIT: Sapa{6016451} & bryanh{6041667}

Please leave any comments here within the next seven days.
PLEASE DO NOT ACCEPT THIS COMMENT AS AN ANSWER!

jmcg
EE Cleanup Volunteer

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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