Killing a script launched in a Process via os.system()
- by L.J.
I have a python script which launches several processes. Each process basically just calls a shell script:
from multiprocessing import Process
import os
import logging
def thread_method(n = 4):
global logger
command = "~/Scripts/run.sh " + str(n) + " >> /var/log/mylog.log"
if (debug): logger.debug(command)
os.system(command)
I launch several of these threads, which are meant to run in the background. I want to have a timeout on these threads, such that if it exceeds the timeout, they are killed:
t = []
for x in range(10):
try:
t.append(Process(target=thread_method, args=(x,) ) )
t[-1].start()
except Exception as e:
logger.error("Error: unable to start thread")
logger.error("Error message: " + str(e))
logger.info("Waiting up to 60 seconds to allow threads to finish")
t[0].join(60)
for n in range(len(t)):
if t[n].is_alive():
logger.info(str(n) + " is still alive after 60 seconds, forcibly terminating")
t[n].terminate()
The problem is that calling terminate() on the process threads isn't killing the launched run.sh script - it continues running in the background until I either force kill it from the command line, or it finishes internally. Is there a way to have terminate also kill the subshell created by os.system()?
