Bash: Killing all processes in subprocess
I don't know exactly why that sleep process gets orphaned, anyway instead kill you can use pkill with -P flag to also kill all children
pkill -TERM -P $pidEDIT:that means that in order to kill a process and all it's children you should use instead
CPIDS=`pgrep -P $pid` # gets pids of child processeskill -9 $pidfor cpid in $CPIDS ; do kill -9 $cpid ; done
You can have a look at rkill that seems to meet your requirements :
http://www.unix.com/man-page/debian/1/rkill/
rkill [-SIG] pid/name...
When invoked as rkill, this utility does not display information about the processes, but sends them all a signal instead. If not specified on the command line, a terminate (SIGTERM) signal is sent.