Question

I wrote a program that forks some processes with fork(). I want to kill all child- and the mother process if there is an error. If I use exit(EXIT_FAILURE) only the child process is killed.

I am thinking about a system(“killall [program_name]”) but there must be a better way…

Thank you all!
Lennart

Answer 1

Under UNIX, send SIGTERM, or SIGABRT, or SIGPIPE or sth. alike to the mother process. This signal will then be propagated to all clients automatically, if they do not explicitely block or ignore it.

Use getppid() to get the PID to send the signal to, and kill() to send the signal.

getppid() returns the process ID of
the parent of the calling process.

The kill() system call can be used to send any signal to any process group or process.

Remarks:
1. Using system is evil. Use internal functions to send signals.
2. killall would be even more evil. Consider several instances of your program running at once.