GNU bug report logs - #15983
24.3; Emacs Not Killing Child Process

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Message #11 received at 15983 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Bozhidar Batsov <bozhidar.batsov <at> gmail.com>
To: 15983 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Fw: bug#15983: 24.3; Emacs Not Killing Child Process
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2013 17:56:46 +0200

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Forwarded message:
> From: Joan Karadimov <joan.karadimov <at> gmail.com>
> To: bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org
> Cc: sjm <at> sjm.io, eliz <at> gnu.org, Bozhidar Batsov <bozhidar.batsov <at> gmail.com>
> Date: Thursday, December 19, 2013 at 5:44:37 PM
> Subject: bug#15983: 24.3; Emacs Not Killing Child Process
> 
> > Emacs on Windows can only monitor and kill its immediate subprocesses, > it cannot monitor, let alone kill, any of their descendant processes, > because it has no idea about them. And the OS doesn't automatically > kill all the processes in the subprocess tree, and there's no way to > send a signal to them all, as on Posix platforms. If killing the > immediate child process doesn't cause some of its children to exit or > abort, then those grandchildren will be left orphaned. Windows NT does have the concept of parent processes, but an API call wasn't exposed in win32 until XP. I wrote a small patch that uses that and kills all child processes (as long as pid<0). I did some sanity testing and it works. 
> There are a few things that this patch leaves unaddressed: - there is no error handling - there is no OS detection - this will get ugly on Windows 9x and NT4/5.0 - performance: 3 API calls are made for each descendant process. This can be reduced to a total 3 calls (regardless of the child process count)
> 
> I'll fix these (and any other issues) if this fix is of any interest.
> 

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