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Question 14 · Sep 11 · Day 2

GPT on Question 14, Sep 11

I'm writing a bash script to purge orphaned children after the parent dies. What's the idiomatic way?

The usual Bash pattern is to trap shell exit/signals and terminate any background jobs:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -uo pipefail

cleanup() {
    rc=$?
    trap - EXIT HUP INT TERM   # prevent recursive traps

    mapfile -t children < <(jobs -pr)
    if ((${#children[@]})); then
        kill -TERM "${children[@]}" 2>/dev/null || :
        wait "${children[@]}" 2>/dev/null || :
    fi

    exit "$rc"
}

trap cleanup EXIT
trap 'exit 129' HUP
trap 'exit 130' INT
trap 'exit 143' TERM

worker_one &
worker_two &

wait

Important limitations:

  • •Traps do not run if the script gets SIGKILL, the machine crashes, etc.
  • •This handles Bash’s direct background jobs, not necessarily grandchildren or daemonized processes.
  • •Avoid kill 0 unless the script owns its process group; otherwise it may kill the invoking shell or unrelated processes.

For an entire descendant tree, use a supervisor/cgroup—e.g. run the script as a systemd service with the default KillMode=control-group. On Linux, another option is launching children through a wrapper that sets PR_SET_PDEATHSIG, though that only directly ties each process to its immediate parent.

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The usual Bash pattern is to trap shell exit/signals and terminate any background jobs:
```bash
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -uo pipefail
cleanup() {
rc=$?
trap - EXIT HUP INT TERM # prevent recursive traps
mapfile -t children < <(jobs -pr)
if ((${#children[@]})); then
kill -TERM "${children[@]}" 2>/dev/null || :
wait "${children[@]}" 2>/dev/null || :
fi
exit "$rc"
}
trap cleanup EXIT
trap 'exit 129' HUP
trap 'exit 130' INT
trap 'exit 143' TERM
worker_one &
worker_two &
wait
```
Important limitations:
- Traps do not run if the script gets `SIGKILL`, the machine crashes, etc.
- This handles Bash’s direct background jobs, not necessarily grandchildren or daemonized processes.
- Avoid `kill 0` unless the script owns its process group; otherwise it may kill the invoking shell or unrelated processes.
For an entire descendant tree, use a supervisor/cgroup—e.g. run the script as a systemd service with the default `KillMode=control-group`. On Linux, another option is launching children through a wrapper that sets `PR_SET_PDEATHSIG`, though that only directly ties each process to its immediate parent.

End of response · 37 lines · 1,156 characters · sha256 4e6cbfe6e4fd84cabfa651f50930573ba69ee575043d12f2edec7741a59abf7c