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§ July 18, 2020

A problem with SIGTERM

The Linux Programming Interface has this to say about the SIGTERM signal:

This is the standard signal used for terminating a process and is the default signal sent by the kill and killall commands. Users sometimes explicitly send the SIGKILL signal to a process using kill -KILL or kill -9. However, this is generally a mistake. A well-designed application will have a handler for SIGTERM that causes the application to exit gracefully, cleaning up temporary files and releasing other resources beforehand.

Sounds good, right? Especially the bit about releasing other resources. You might think that a shell script that executes another long-lived process will terminate that process when it receives a SIGTERM. Let’s try it. Here’s a simple bash script:

#!/bin/bash

python -m http.server 8800

Call it start-server.bash and run it in a terminal:

$ bash ./start-server.bash
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8800 (http://0.0.0.0:8800/) ...

In another terminal, we can run ps to see the two processes: the parent bash process, and the child python process. We also see two zsh processes, which are the shells running in my two terminals. I’ll use the -j flag to get the parent PID of processes (PPID).

$ ps -j
USER    PID  PPID  PGID   SESS JOBC STAT   TT       TIME COMMAND
mjhoy 62548 62547 62548      0    1 S    s001    0:00.05 -zsh
mjhoy 61001 61000 61001      0    1 S    s002    0:00.30 -zsh
mjhoy 62620 61001 62620      0    1 S+   s002    0:00.01 bash start-server.bash
mjhoy 62621 62620 62620      0    1 S+   s002    0:00.11 /usr/bin/python -m http.server 8800

Note that the PPID of the python process (62620) is the PID of the bash process. Control-C in the terminal running the server works as expected:

^C
Keyboard interrupt received, exiting.

And both processes have stopped:

$ ps -j
USER    PID  PPID  PGID   SESS JOBC STAT   TT       TIME COMMAND
mjhoy 62548 62547 62548      0    1 S    s001    0:00.05 -zsh
mjhoy 61001 61000 61001      0    1 S    s002    0:00.30 -zsh

Control-C sends the SIGINT signal to the foreground process in the terminal. The bash process properly forwards this along to its child processes, as you would expect. SIGTERM, however, does not get forwarded to the subprocesses. Again, let’s start a server, and get ps from another terminal:

$ ps -j
USER    PID  PPID  PGID   SESS JOBC STAT   TT       TIME COMMAND
mjhoy 62548 62547 62548      0    1 S    s001    0:00.06 -zsh
mjhoy 61001 61000 61001      0    1 S    s002    0:00.35 -zsh
mjhoy 62785 61001 62785      0    1 S+   s002    0:00.01 bash start-server.bash
mjhoy 62786 62785 62785      0    1 S+   s002    0:00.11 /usr/bin/python -m http.server 8800

We can send a signal manually using kill. If we run kill -INT -62785, for instance, that does the same thing as hitting Control-C in our server terminal, and both processes (bash and python) exit. But with TERM this doesn’t happen:

$ kill -TERM 62785
$ ps -j
USER    PID  PPID  PGID   SESS JOBC STAT   TT       TIME COMMAND
mjhoy 62548 62547 62548      0    1 S    s001    0:00.07 -zsh
mjhoy 61001 61000 61001      0    1 S+   s002    0:00.35 -zsh
mjhoy 62786     1 62785      0    0 S    s002    0:00.15 /usr/bin/python -m http.server 8800

In the other terminal, it seems like the server was stopped, but in fact the python server is still happily running on port 8800.

So: beware of SIGTERM. It’s worth noting that TERM is the default kill signal; i.e., just running kill 62785 sends the TERM signal to that process.

There are two ways to solve this in the bash script. One is to use exec, which will replace the bash process with the python process, instead of forking as a subprocess:

#!/bin/bash

exec python -m http.server 8800

The other way is to install a signal handler that will properly kill the subprocess on receiving a SIGTERM. It’s a little weird, because you need to get the pid of the subprocess for the handler, but you can do it like so:

#!/bin/bash

handle_term() {
  kill -TERM "$child_pid"
}

trap handle_term SIGTERM
python -m http.server 8800 &
child_pid=$!
wait "$child_pid"

I ran into an issue with this at work, because the foreman ruby gem, which is a popular way in rubyland to manage multiple processes, sends the SIGTERM signal to child processes if any other child process fails to start. So, if any child process is a bash script that starts a server and doesn’t explicitly handle SIGTERM, or (worse) if you happen to define a subprocess like so:

cd some_directory && ./run_server

you will find yourself with server processes that continue to run after foreman exits. The only thing then is to hunt them down with lsof and kill them manually.