Re: Easy shell question: how to make a script killing all his childs when killed?

Marco Costalba, Sat, Dec 09, 2006 16:16:32 +0100:

Strictly speaking: you can't. Anything you'd try will either be not portable or involve quiet complex dependencies (like perl). Are you sure you can't control each process independently?

Speaking not so strictly, you can use a script engine which supports either signal handling or exit notification (i.e. sh has traps and perl has %SIG and END{}). It's unsafe, ugly and not quiet portable to that other operating system, but it often works and is (ab)used.

Which is "fancy" enough. What do you mean "start"? Starting a new process usually and notably involves forking and execing (even if the first thing to exec will be your shell).