Why Doesn\'t Go\'s cmd.Process.Kill() Work on Child Processes?

Why Go's cmd.Process.Kill() Fails to Terminate Child Processes

While using cmd.Process.Kill() may seem like a straightforward approach to kill a child process in Go, it has a significant limitation: it doesn't work on child processes. This has been reported in multiple questions, such as "Process.Kill() on child processes."

Solution

To overcome this issue, a more comprehensive approach is required. A solution suggested by the Go community is to utilize the SysProcAttr.Setpgid attribute and the syscall.Kill() function. This approach involves the following steps:

• Set SysProcAttr.Setpgid to true to create a new process group for the child process.
• Start the child process using cmd.Start().
• Obtain the process group ID (pgid) using syscall.Getpgid().
• Send a SIGTERM signal (signal 15) to the process group using syscall.Kill(-pgid, 15). The negative sign is crucial to target the process group.
• Finally, call cmd.Wait() to wait for the child process to terminate.

Caveat

It's important to note that this approach may not be cross-platform compatible. While it has been tested on macOS Yosemite and Linux systems, its behavior on BSD and Windows may vary.

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