Tree Kill

Kill all processes in the process tree, including the root process.

Examples

Kill all the descendent processes of the process with pid 1, including the process with pid 1 itself:

var kill = require('tree-kill');
kill(1);

Send a signal other than SIGTERM.:

var kill = require('tree-kill');
kill(1, 'SIGKILL');

Run a callback when done killing the processes. Passes an error argument if there was an error.

var kill = require('tree-kill');
kill(1, 'SIGKILL', function(err) {
    // Do things
});

You can also install tree-kill globally and use it as a command:

tree-kill 1          # sends SIGTERM to process 1 and its descendents
tree-kill 1 SIGTERM  # same
tree-kill 1 SIGKILL  # sends KILL instead of TERMINATE

Methods

require('tree-kill')(pid, [signal], [callback]);

Sends signal signal to all children processes of the process with pid pid, including pid. Signal defaults to SIGTERM.

For Linux, this uses ps -o pid --no-headers --ppid PID to find the parent pids of PID.

For Darwin/OSX, this uses pgrep -P PID to find the parent pids of PID.

For Windows, this uses 'taskkill /pid PID /T /F' to kill the process tree. Note that on Windows, sending the different kinds of POSIX signals is not possible.

Install

With npm do:

npm install tree-kill

License

MIT

Changelog

[1.2.2] - 2019-12-11

Changed

• security fix: sanitize pid parameter to fix arbitrary code execution vulnerability

[1.2.1] - 2018-11-05

Changed

• added missing LICENSE file
• updated TypeScript definitions

[1.2.0] - 2017-09-19

Added

• TypeScript definitions

  Changed

• kill(pid, callback) works. Before you had to use kill(pid, signal, callback)

[1.1.0] - 2016-05-13

Added

• A tree-kill CLI

[1.0.0] - 2015-09-17

Added

• optional callback
• Darwin support