I’m launching a subprocess with the following command:

p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)

However, when I try to kill using:

p.terminate()

or

p.kill()

The command keeps running in the background, so I was wondering how can I actually terminate the process.

Note that when I run the command with:

p = subprocess.Popen(cmd.split(), stdout=subprocess.PIPE)

It does terminate successfully when issuing the p.terminate().

Use a process group so as to enable sending a signal to all the process in the groups. For that, you should attach a session id to the parent process of the spawned/child processes, which is a shell in your case. This will make it the group leader of the processes. So now, when a signal is sent to the process group leader, it’s transmitted to all of the child processes of this group.

Here’s the code:

import os
import signal
import subprocess

# The os.setsid() is passed in the argument preexec_fn so
# it's run after the fork() and before  exec() to run the shell.
pro = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, 
                       shell=True, preexec_fn=os.setsid) 

os.killpg(os.getpgid(pro.pid), signal.SIGTERM)  # Send the signal to all the process groups

p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)
p.kill()

p.kill() ends up killing the shell process and cmd is still running.

I found a convenient fix this by:

p = subprocess.Popen("exec " + cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)

This will cause cmd to inherit the shell process, instead of having the shell launch a child process, which does not get killed. p.pid will be the id of your cmd process then.

p.kill() should work.

I don’t know what effect this will have on your pipe though.

If you can use psutil, then this works perfectly:

import subprocess

import psutil


def kill(proc_pid):
    process = psutil.Process(proc_pid)
    for proc in process.children(recursive=True):
        proc.kill()
    process.kill()


proc = subprocess.Popen(["infinite_app", "param"], shell=True)
try:
    proc.wait(timeout=3)
except subprocess.TimeoutExpired:
    kill(proc.pid)

I could do it using

from subprocess import Popen

process = Popen(command, shell=True)
Popen("TASKKILL /F /PID {pid} /T".format(pid=process.pid))

it killed the cmd.exe and the program that i gave the command for.

(On Windows)

When shell=True the shell is the child process, and the commands are its children. So any SIGTERM or SIGKILL will kill the shell but not its child processes, and I don’t remember a good way to do it. The best way I can think of is to use shell=False, otherwise when you kill the parent shell process, it will leave a defunct shell process.

None of this answers worked for me so Im leaving the code that did work. In my case even after killing the process with .kill() and getting a .poll() return code the process didn’t terminate.

Following the subprocess.Popen documentation:

“…in order to cleanup properly a well-behaved application should kill the child process and finish communication…”

proc = subprocess.Popen(...)
try:
    outs, errs = proc.communicate(timeout=15)
except TimeoutExpired:
    proc.kill()
    outs, errs = proc.communicate()

In my case I was missing the proc.communicate() after calling proc.kill(). This cleans the process stdin, stdout … and does terminate the process.

As Sai said, the shell is the child, so signals are intercepted by it — best way I’ve found is to use shell=False and use shlex to split the command line:

if isinstance(command, unicode):
    cmd = command.encode('utf8')
args = shlex.split(cmd)

p = subprocess.Popen(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)

Then p.kill() and p.terminate() should work how you expect.

what i feel like we could use:

import os
import signal
import subprocess
p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)

os.killpg(os.getpgid(pro.pid), signal.SIGINT)

this will not kill all your task but the process with the p.pid

I know this is an old question but this may help someone looking for a different method. This is what I use on windows to kill processes that I’ve called.

si = subprocess.STARTUPINFO()
si.dwFlags |= subprocess.STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW
subprocess.call(["taskkill", "/IM", "robocopy.exe", "/T", "/F"], startupinfo=si)

/IM is the image name, you can also do /PID if you want. /T kills the process as well as the child processes. /F force terminates it. si, as I have it set, is how you do this without showing a CMD window. This code is used in python 3.

Send the signal to all the processes in group

    self.proc = Popen(commands, 
            stdout=PIPE, 
            stderr=STDOUT, 
            universal_newlines=True, 
            preexec_fn=os.setsid)

    os.killpg(os.getpgid(self.proc.pid), signal.SIGHUP)
    os.killpg(os.getpgid(self.proc.pid), signal.SIGTERM)

I have not seen this mentioned here, so I am putting it out there in case someone needs it. If all you want to do is to make sure that your subprocess terminates successfully, you could put it in a context manager. For example, I wanted my standard printer to print an out image and using the context manager ensured that the subprocess terminated.

import subprocess

with open(filename,'rb') as f:
    img=f.read()
with subprocess.Popen("/usr/bin/lpr", stdin=subprocess.PIPE) as lpr:
    lpr.stdin.write(img)
print('Printed image...')

I believe this method is also cross-platform.