In a ruby script, I start more virtual shells, each managed by a shell manager object, like so:
#shell = PTY.spawn 'env PS1="\w>" TERM=dumb COLUMNS=63 LINES=21 sh -i'
At some later point in time, I would like to destroy this instance and also kill the associated shell process. Sadly, I can't get anything to work properly. Here's what I tried, in order of probability to work:
Nothing, that is, expecting the shell proc gets closed when the managing object gets destroyed.
Killing all processes running on the shell (this works) with the kill command, and then killing the shell itself with system("kill #{#shell[2]"). This has no effect.
Using -9 in the above. This leaves the shell process defunct.
All the shells get closed when the ruby program exits, but I want to kill them while keeping the program running. Anyone encounter something like this before?
The problem is zombies. Yes, really.
All Unix-style kernel's leave the process around until someone waits for it. (That's in order to keep track of the PID, the exit status, and a bit of other stuff.) They are called zombies and have a Z state in the ps(1) listing. You can't kill them, because they are already dead. They go away when you wait for them.
So here is how to clean up your #shell object:
#shell[0].close
#shell[1].close
begin
Process.wait #shell[2]
rescue PTY::ChildExited
end
You may not need the rescue block depending on whether you have higher level layers catching exceptions too broadly. (Sigh, like my irb.)
By the way, the reason your process finally vanished when the Ruby program exited is because then the zombie also became an orphan (no parent process) and either the shell or init(8) will eventually wait for all orphans.
Related
I have this code:
#!/bin/bash
pids=()
for i in $(seq 1 999); do
sleep 1 &
pids+=( "$!" )
done
for pid in "${pids[#]}"; do
wait "$pid"
done
I expect the following behavior:
spin through the first loop
wait about a second on the first pid
spin through the second loop
Instead, I get this error:
./foo.sh: line 8: wait: pid 24752 is not a child of this shell
(repeated 171 times with different pids)
If I run the script with shorter loop (50 instead of 999), then I get no errors.
What's going on?
Edit: I am using GNU bash 4.4.23 on Windows.
POSIX says:
The implementation need not retain more than the {CHILD_MAX} most recent entries in its list of known process IDs in the current shell execution environment.
{CHILD_MAX} here refers to the maximum number of simultaneous processes allowed per user. You can get the value of this limit using the getconf utility:
$ getconf CHILD_MAX
13195
Bash stores the statuses of at most twice as that many exited background processes in a circular buffer, and says not a child of this shell when you call wait on the PID of an old one that's been overwritten. You can see how it's implemented here.
The way you might reasonably expect this to work, as it would if you wrote a similar program in most other languages, is:
sleep is executed in the background via a fork+exec.
At some point, sleep exits leaving behind a zombie.
That zombie remains in place, holding its PID, until its parent calls wait to retrieve its exit code.
However, shells such as bash actually do this a little differently. They proactively reap their zombie children and store their exit codes in memory so that they can deallocate the system resources those processes were using. Then when you wait the shell just hands you whatever value is stored in memory, but the zombie could be long gone by then.
Now, because all of these exit statuses are being stored in memory, there is a practical limit to how many background processes can exit without you calling wait before you've filled up all the memory you have available for this in the shell. I expect that you're hitting this limit somewhere in the several hundreds of processes in your environment, while other users manage to make it into the several thousands in theirs. Regardless, the outcome is the same - eventually there's nowhere to store information about your children and so that information is lost.
I can reproduce on ArchLinux with docker run -ti --rm bash:5.0.18 bash -c 'pids=; for ((i=1;i<550;++i)); do true & pids+=" $!"; done; wait $pids' and any earlier. I can't reproduce with bash:5.1.0 .
What's going on?
It looks like a bug in your version of Bash. There were a couple of improvements in jobs.c and wait.def in Bash:5.1 and Make sure SIGCHLD is blocked in all cases where waitchld() is not called from a signal handler is mentioned in the changelog. From the look of it, it looks like an issue with handling a SIGCHLD signal while already handling another SIGCHLD signal.
When I attempt to exit ruby processes, namely, specs, rails console, and binding.pry calls, there are two options: ctrl+c, ctrl+z, or if things are really stuck, open a separate tab and killall ruby. However, when I ctrl+c the first time, the terminal outputs Exiting... Interrupt again to exit immediately. but hangs permanently. If I ctrl+c again to force exit, it successfully exits. However, from that point on, I can no longer see what I'm typing into the shell. So if I type ls, the line will still appear blank, but if I hit enter, it will successfully execute the ls command.
When I ctrl+z, it manages to stop the process successfully. However, after doing this a few times, I wind up with a bunch of ruby processes running, which seem to block running new ruby processes. In this scenario, killall ruby does nothing (nor does any derivative such as looking up by pid). I have to open activity monitor (mac) and force quit each proc individually.
Any ideas how I managed to get myself into this/how to resolve it?
Killing all your Ruby instances is a shotgun approach; you might hit targets you didn't intend, so I suggest to avoid it.
When your shell doesn't show what you're typing any more you need to (blindly) enter reset to reset the terminal.
Ctrl+Z doesn't kill your process, it just get's suspended. You should get an output that tells you a job number, like:
[1] + 95295 suspended man reset
Here, 1 is the job number. You can then resume the command by typing fg %<jobnumber>, in this example fg %1. Or you can kill it with kill -9 %<jobnumber>, like kill -9 %1.
I have a requirement in shell script that in case if shell terminates for some reason I.e terminal closed or user terminated, I would like to do some work like clean up and unlocking etc. Is it possible? If so please explain how it can be done.
Thanks in advance,
Praveen P B
Yes it is possible. Check for signal using trap command. See help trap.
Example
cleanup() {
...
exit
}
trap cleanup SIGINT # user terminated
trap cleanup SIGHUP # terminal closed
trap cleanup SIGTERM # killed with kill -15
What #Grzegorz said, is correct, but note the following:
You didn't indicate the OS (and shell, but we assume sh), so to stay POSIXly correct you should use uppercase signal names (like SIGINT). Also see here.
Unless you want to let your script continue running, after receiving the signal, you should put exit as the last line in your "cleanup" function.
Don't forget to manually call your "cleanup" function before exiting the script by other means (i.e. before "falling off" the end or whenever you manually call exit). Alternatively register a handler with trap cleanup EXIT.
Note that you cannot catch SIGKILL, i.e. kill -9 <mypid> by this means (or any other means for that matter). So make sure you can somehow deal with the fact that cleanup may actually not happen. For example, check during your script initialization, whether old (orphaned) lock-files still exist and exit with an error, telling the user/admin to clean up manually. Now, differentiating between lock-files that legitimately exist and remains of a killed instance, might not be trivial and largely depends on your script. You could write the scripts PID into the lock-file, and then, if a lock-file exists when (another instance of) your scripts finds a lock-file make sure that the process with that PID still exists, if it does, chances are another script instance is truely running. Otherwise, manual cleanup might be necessary. But even that is not 100% fail safe.
I've seen monitoring programs either in scripts that check process status using 'ps' or 'service status(on Linux)' periodically, or in C/C++ that forks and wait on the process...
I wonder if it is possible to use bash with trap and restart the sub-process when SIGCLD received?
I have tested a basic suite on RedHat Linux with following idea (and certainly it didn't work...)
#!/bin/bash
set -o monitor # can someone explain this? discussion on Internet say this is needed
trap startProcess SIGCHLD
startProcess() {
/path/to/another/bash/script.sh & # the one to restart
while [ 1 ]
do
sleep 60
done
}
startProcess
what the bash script being started just sleep for a few seconds and exit for now.
several issues observed:
when the shell starts in foreground, SIGCHLD will be handled only once. does trap reset signal handling like signal()?
the script and its child seem to be immune to SIGINT, which means they cannot be stopped by ^C
since cannot be closed, I closed the terminal. The script seems to be HUP and many zombie children left.
when run in background, the script caused terminal to die
... anyway, this does not work at all. I have to say I know too little about this topic.
Can someone suggest or give some working examples?
Are there scripts for such use?
how about use wait in bash, then?
Thanks
I can try to answer some of your questions but not all based on what I
know.
The line set -o monitor (or equivalently, set -m) turns on job
control, which is only on by default for interactive shells. This seems
to be required for SIGCHLD to be sent. However, job control is more of
an interactive feature and not really meant to be used in shell scripts
(see also this question).
Also keep in mind this is probably not what you intended to do
because once you enable job control, SIGCHLD will be sent for every
external command that exists (e.g. every time you run ls or grep or
anything, a SIGCHLD will fire when that command completes and your trap
will run).
I suspect the reason the SIGCHLD trap only appears to run once is
because your trap handler contains a foreground infinite loop, so your
script gets stuck in the trap handler. There doesn't seem to be a point
to that loop anyways, so you could simply remove it.
The script's "immunity" to SIGINT seems to be an effect of enabling
job control (the monitor part). My hunch is with job control turned on,
the sub-instance of bash that runs your script no longer terminates
itself in response to a SIGINT but instead passes the SIGINT through to
its foreground child process. In your script, the ^C i.e. SIGINT
simply acts like a continue statement in other programming languages
case, since SIGINT will just kill the currently running sleep 60,
whereupon the while loop will immediately run a new sleep 60.
When I tried running your script and then killing it (from another
terminal), all I ended up with were two stray sleep processes.
Backgrounding that script also kills my shell for me, although
the behavior is not terribly consistent (sometimes it happens
immediately, other times not at all). It seems typing any keys other
than enter causes an EOF to get sent somehow. Even after the terminal
exits the script continues to run in the background. I have no idea
what is going on here.
Being more specific about what you want to accomplish would help. If
you just want a command to run continuously for the lifetime of your
script, you could run an infinite loop in the background, like
while true; do
some-command
echo some-command finished
echo restarting some-command ...
done &
Note the & after the done.
For other tasks, wait is probably a better idea than using job control
in a shell script. Again, it would depend on what exactly you are trying
to do.
My scripts cdist-deploy-to and cdist-mass-deploy (from cdist configuration management) run interactively (i.e. are called by a user).
These scripts call a lot of scripts, which again call some scripts:
cdist-mass-deploy ...
cdist-deploy-to ...
cdist-explorer-run-global ...
cdist-dir ....
What I want is to exit / kill all scripts, as soon as cdist-mass-deploy is either stopped by control C (SIGINT) or killed with SIGTERM.
cdist-deploy-to can also be called interactively and should exhibit the same behaviour.
Using ps -ef... and co variants to find out all processes with the ppid looks like it could be quite unportable. Using $! does not work as in the deeper levels the children are no background processes.
I tried using the following code:
__cdist_kill_on_interrupt()
{
__cdist_tmp_removal
kill 0
exit 1
}
trap __cdist_kill_on_interrupt INT TERM
But this leads to ugly Terminated messages as well as to a segfault in the shells (dash, bash, zsh) and seems not to stop everything instantly anyway:
# cdist-mass-deploy -p ikq04.ethz.ch ikq05.ethz.ch
core: Waiting for cdist-deploy-to jobs to finish
^CTerminated
Terminated
Terminated
Terminated
Segmentation fault
So the question is, how to cleanly exit including all (sub-)children in a portable manner (bourne shell, no csh support needed)?
You don't need to handle ^C, that will result in a signal being sent to the whole process group, which will kill all the processes that are not in the background. So you don't need to catch INT.
The only reason you get a Terminated when you kill them is that kill sends TERM by default, but that's reasonable if you are handling a TERM in the first place. You could use kill -INT 0 if you want to avoid the messages.
(responding with extra info)
If the child processes are run in the background, you can get their process ids just after you start them, using the $! special shell variable. Gather these together in a variable and just kill them all when you need to terminate.