Question

I’m using child_process.spawn/child_process.fork to start a number of child processes from a node.js application. When stopping the parent process with Ctrl-C the child processes are stopped too. Is there an elegant way to keep the child processes running?

Answer 1

You could try catching SIGINT in your child:

// child.js
process.on("SIGINT", function() { console.log("sigint caught") });

// parent.js
var fork = require("child_process").fork,
    child = fork(__dirname + "/child.js");

Run parent.js and press ^C. Your child.js should continue running in the background. I don’t know what the effects of this will be during the lifetime of child.js.

Here is an enlightening, albeit pretty old, discussion of the topic on the node.js mailing list.