send_signal() only applies to parent process

[maxvirrozeito]

I use spawn() within a spur shell. It creates a process on a remote machine as well as a child process (because of piped commands).

Then, when I want to kill the processes started (parent and child), I use:
process.send_signal(signal.SIGTERM)
but it only terminates the parent process.

In the implementation of send_signal() in SshProcess, I believe that a '-' sign in front of the PID would allow to terminate the full process group i.e. parent and child.
self._shell.run(["kill", "-{0}".format(signal), str(-self.pid)])

This change worked for me but I would like to hear the comments of one of the maintainers for spur.
Thanks

[mwilliamson]

Are you suggesting that the behaviour of the command be changed? Or are you suggesting a flag? Or something else?

In the meantime, since it's just running a kill command, you can implement your own version of send_signal() that sends the signal to the group.

[maxvirrozeito]

For now, I am just calling directly a kill command to go around the default behaviour like you suggest.

But I think that spur would benefit from having the ability to kill a group of processes. Initially I was thinking about changing the behaviour of the send_signal() command but maybe an extra argument to that function would be better and provide the most flexibility:

def send_signal(self, signal, group=False):
   if group:
      self._shell.run(["kill", "-{0}".format(signal), str(-self.pid)])
   else:
      self._shell.run(["kill", "-{0}".format(signal), str(self.pid)])