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node.jsshellspawn

nodejs spawn a process in real shell and kill this process

I'have a process created with a spawn in nodejs with the option shell:true so the process starts in a real shell. So when I try to kill this process with streamingTask.kill() it's not working. Without the option shell:true everything works fine.

This is how my code looks:

var options = {shell:true};  
streamingTask = spawn('gst-launch-1.0',args,options);

... 

streamingTask.kill()

So how can I kill this process now?

Solution

  • This doesn't work because you are killing the shell process itself, not the child process(es) spawned by the shell (gst-launch-1.0 in your case).

    There's a package on npm called tree-kill that provides an easy one-line solution:

    var kill = require('tree-kill');
kill(streamingTask.pid);