I'm trying to set up a shell script so that it runs background processes, and when I ctrl+C the shell script, it kills the children, then exits. The best that I've managed to come up with is this. It appears that kill 0 -INT also kills the script before the wait happens, so the shell script dies before the children complete. Any ideas on how I can make this shell script wait for the children to die after sending INT? #!/bin/bash trap 'killall' INT killall() { echo **** Shutting down... **** kill 0 -INT wait # Why doesn't this wait?? echo DONE } process1 & process2 & process3 & cat # wait forever