Child::kill will not terminate children on Linux

[cottnn]

Location

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/process/struct.Child.html#method.kill

Summary

Documentation for Child::kill in standard library should include a note that the signal won't be sent to any children of the process, only to the process itself (at least on Linux).

This can be confusing because people might expect that Child::kill will terminate the process completely, including it's children.

I think the proper way to kill the process and it's children is to send the signal to the process group

https://linux.die.net/man/2/killpg
https://linux.die.net/man/2/kill

Edit: Standard library includes Command::process_group method. .process_group(0) will set child's process group to it's PID. After spawning the command, it will be possible to call kill(-pid, SIGKILL), which will terminate the child and all it's children

[the8472]

This can be confusing because people might expect that Child::kill will terminate the process completely, including it's children.

Well, that's not possible in general anyway since a descendant process may detach itself from the tree to get reparented to the nearest reaper.

[cottnn]

Well, that's not possible in general anyway since a descendant process may detach itself from the tree to get reparented to the nearest reaper.

That's true, however I was only referring to children that weren't detached from their parent at the time of calling Child::kill