How Can I Reliably Terminate Child Executables from a Go Program?

Ensuring the Termination of Child Executables in Go

In Go, you may come across situations where your program runs multiple threads concurrently, each invoking separate executables. In such cases, if the main Go process is terminated, it's crucial to find a way to also stop the running executables. This article explores how to achieve this in Go.

The conventional way to ensure the termination of child executables is to assign them to the same process group as the main Go process and then kill the process group as a whole. Alternatively, you can specify the Pdeathsig field in syscall.SetProcAttr to control the signal sent to the child process when the main process is terminated.

However, it's important to note that catching signals like SIG_INT and SIG_TERM in signal handlers and killing the child processes before exiting the program isn't always reliable, as SIG_KILL cannot be captured. Therefore, the approach of killing the process group or setting Pdeadsig is generally preferred.

To illustrate, consider the following code snippet:

cmd := exec.Command("./long-process")

cmd.SysProcAttr = &syscall.SysProcAttr{
    Pdeathsig: syscall.SIGTERM,
}

In this example, we assign the child executable to the same process group as the main Go process by setting SysProcAttr. When the Go process terminates, the specified signal (SIGTERM in this case) will be sent to the child executable, causing it to terminate.

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