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bashshellunixbackground-processkill

Implicitly kill background processes connected to a foreground process

In Bash, I start a number of processes run in the background and have Bash wait in the foreground:

sleep 7 & sleep 10 & wait

(This is actually a simplification of what npm script does, which is the application of this question.)

Then, whenever I Ctrl+C out of the wait process, I would like all background processes killed.

Is this possible at all? How?

Solution

  • The background processes are child processes of the shell, but not child processes of wait, so there is no good way to propagate a signal to wait to any of the other processes.

    A quick and dirty way to kill all background processes, which you can put into a script or an alias, is

    kill -INT $(jobs -l | awk '{print $2}')

    kill -INT $(jobs -p)