how to kill a subprocess

[MRAB]

On 09/09/2010 23:52, cerr wrote:
> On Sep 9, 3:29 pm, Alain Ketterlin<al... at dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr>
> wrote:
>> cerr<ron.egg... at gmail.com>  writes:
>>> I'm calling a python script from a php script which again calls a perl
>>> script with subprocess.popen().
>>> This seems to work fine so far only that once the python script
>>> completed it is becoming a zombie because the perl script in the
>>> background is still running... so before i exit the python script, i
>>> would need to kill my perl subprocess.
>>> How can i do so?
>>
>> x.terminate() (and then x.wait()) where x is the value returned by
>> subprocess.Popen().
> Well, this is what I have:
>
>    writelog("starting GPS simulator")
>    commandlist=[GPSsim,proto,GPSfile]
>    writelog(commandlist[0]+" "+commandlist[1]+" "+commandlist[2])
>    process=subprocess.Popen(commandlist)
>    writelog("GPS simulator started")
>    ...
>    ...
>    os.kill(process.pid,9)
>    os.wait()
>
> but this is not working for me... :( any clues?
>
>> P/S: I'm not sure why the python process survives, and I think your use
>> of "zombie" is not correct (afaik a zombie is an exited process whose
>> parent hasn't called wait() yet)
>
> This is what I have:
>
> localhost cgi-bin # ps ax | grep py
> 11853 ?        Z      0:00 [python2.6]<defunct>
> 12029 pts/1    S+     0:00 grep --colour=auto py
>
> The 'Z' you see there stands for Zombie
>
How about:

     process.kill() # New in Python 2.6

or:

     os.kill(process.pid, 9)

then:

     process.wait()

or:

     os.waitpid(process.pid, 0)