Kill a running subprocess call

Well, there are a couple of methods on the object returned by subprocess.Popen() which may be of use: Popen.terminate() and Popen.kill(), which send a SIGTERM and SIGKILL respectively.

For example...

import subprocessimport timeprocess = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True)time.sleep(5)process.terminate()

...would terminate the process after five seconds.

Or you can use os.kill() to send other signals, like SIGINT to simulate CTRL-C, with...

import subprocessimport timeimport osimport signalprocess = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True)time.sleep(5)os.kill(process.pid, signal.SIGINT)

p = subprocess.Popen("echo 'foo' && sleep 60 && echo 'bar'", shell=True)p.kill()

Check out the docs on the subprocess module for more info: http://docs.python.org/2/library/subprocess.html

You can use two signals to kill a running subprocess call i.e., signal.SIGTERM and signal.SIGKILL; for example

import subprocessimport osimport signalimport time..process = subprocess.Popen(..)..# killing all processes in the groupos.killpg(process.pid, signal.SIGTERM)time.sleep(2)if process.poll() is None:  # Force kill if process is still alive    time.sleep(3)    os.killpg(process.pid, signal.SIGKILL)