Subprocess management - Killing a subprocess

Question

I have been trying to make a python script that will play on Mac OS X and I have gotten it to work with a .py script in Terminal, but I can't stop it. I have been trying for weeks, os.kill() , process.terminate() , everything I could find on other StackOverflow questions. Here is my code, can anyone tell me the proper way to terminate this sub-process? (I believe I am using python 2.7)

import time
import subprocess

subprocess.call(["afplay", "/Users/0095226/Desktop/introsong.wav"])
time.sleep(4)
(WHATEVER KILLS IT HERE PLEASE)

Answer 1

You need to use subprocess.Popen() as you can assign the process handle to a variable and later kill it.

import time
import subprocess

p = subprocess.Popen(["calc"])
time.sleep(4)
p.kill()

The other method is to use os.kill() along with signal.SIGINT to kill the process, as seen here:

import time
import signal
import subprocess
import os

p = subprocess.Popen(["calc"])
time.sleep(4)
os.kill(p.pid, signal.SIGINT)

We are able to access the PID (Process ID) and therefore we can kill it using os.kill() . signal is the module which contains codes for how to kill the process, eg send it the abort (SIGABRT), interrupt (SIGINT) etc.