How can I kill all child processes when exiting from my shell script?

Question

I've got a C shell script that runs a program. That program spawns off a child. When I send a SIGINT to my shell script via ctrl-C, the shell script exits as well as the process that it spawned I think. However, the last process remains. How can I instruct C shell to kill all child processes before it exits then?

Answer 1

How about creating a signal trap for SIGINT? See the Interrupt Handling section here :

#!/bin/csh

# Setup sigint handler
onintr close

# start a background process
sleep 1000&
setenv pid $!

while (1 == 1)
  echo Program is running
  sleep 2
end

close:
echo End of program. Kill $pid
kill $pid