Kill tree (all sub-processes)

[borekb]

Typical use case is starting a process with multiple sub-processes and then wanting to killing them all:

const child = require('child_process').exec("node -e 'while (true);'");
child.kill(); // will not work

It's been implemented for Windows in https://github.com/sindresorhus/fkill/pull/20, would be nice to have this functionality cross-platform.

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Submitted pull Requests

• #1 Support killing process trees cross-platform

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[borekb]

Some packages to possibly draw inspiration from:

• kill-process
• tree-kill
• ps-tree

(I'm actually on Windows so cannot help testing this on Mac / Linux but these are the resources I've found.)

[simonepri]

I would also suggest pidtree.
ps-tree actually does not gives you all the sub-processes.

Anyway tree-kill seems more suited for this job.
Instead we can use it inside the fkill-cli package to show to the users which other processes will be killed.

[IssueHuntBot]

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[sindresorhus]

If anyone wants to work on this, see the initial attempt and feedback in https://github.com/sindresorhus/fkill/pull/34.

[Isjuanplayer]

I implemented a fix for this in a fork, but this repository currently has GitHub pull requests disabled (has_pull_requests: false), so GitHub returns 404 when trying to open the PR against sindresorhus/fkill.

Branch: https://github.com/Isjuanplayer/fkill/tree/issuehunt/fkill-process-tree
Commit: Isjuanplayer@c9c9c88
Compare: main...Isjuanplayer:fkill:issuehunt/fkill-process-tree

Summary:

• Adds process-tree killing for non-Windows platforms by walking the ps-list parent/child process map and killing descendants before the requested parent process.
• Keeps Windows on the existing taskkill implementation.
• Honors tree: false and keeps negative-PID process group behavior unchanged.
• Adds a regression fixture/test that verifies a parent Node process and child process are both terminated.
• Updates the tree option docs to remove the Windows-only note.

Validation:

• npx xo index.js test.js fixture-tree.js
• npx tsd
• node --test --test-name-pattern "kill process tree" test.js

[Kikobeats]

@Isjuanplayer can you verify if this tricky for killing subprocess could be enough?
https://github.com/Kikobeats/kill-process-group/blob/master/src/index.js

[nmc237]

I prepared an implementation for this, but GitHub shows that pull requests are disabled for this repository.

Branch with the patch:
https://github.com/nmc237/fkill/tree/codex/fkill-process-tree

Commit:
nmc237@e854aa5

Summary:

• Adds process-tree traversal for non-Windows platforms using ps-list.
• Keeps the existing Windows taskkill behavior unchanged.
• Preserves tree: false so callers can still kill only the parent process.
• Updates README and TypeScript docs to remove the Windows-only limitation.
• Adds tests for default tree killing and tree: false.

Validation:

• git diff --check
• npm test passed locally with 27 tests.