Python: timed-out psutil process killed (as instructed) in Windows, but not in Linux

Question

This works as I expect it to on Windows (64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium, SP1), using Python 3.5.1. However, on Linux (OpenSUSE 13.2, Harlequin, i586 with KDE 4.14.9), using Python 3.4.1, any timed-out process never gets killed.

My process handling is basically that of the answer given on StackOverflow to Python: Run a process and kill it if it doesn't end within one hour (by Giampaolo Rodolà, on May 10 2012)

Here's (simplified) what I did:

import os
import psutil


if os.name == 'nt':  # If running on Windows...
    app = r'C:\Program Files (x86)\Foxit Software\Foxit Reader\FoxitReader.exe'
else:
    app = r'apps/foxitreader/FoxitReader.sh'

process = psutil.Popen([app, os.path.join('raw_pdfs', 'Thinkpython.pdf')])

try:

    process.wait(timeout=5.0)  # Wait specified seconds to see if application crashes.

    print('Process crashed with return code %d.' % process.poll())
    # If you get here, the process crashed before timing out.

except psutil.TimeoutExpired:  # If the timeout expired as normally expected, Then...

    print('Process timed-out normally.')

    process.kill()

Rather than the FoxitReader process being killed after 5 seconds, the PDF file continued to stay open in FoxitReader.

The resulting Python interpreter output was:

Openfile()---fileName-: "raw_pdfs/Thinkpython.pdf"
sendMessage
Process timed-out normally.

Sometimes, the output also included a lot more, seemingly from Qt (which I think the Linux version of FoxitReader is written with). I don't think it's relevant, but (in case I'm wrong) here 's an example.

I tried doing:

process.terminate()

before the:

process.kill()

(as it looked like How to kill Linux process with Python might be suggesting, but that made no difference.

[This is for some Python3 'fuzz testing' of PDF readers. I randomly change some bytes in valid PDF files, and then test to see if any of the 'fuzzed' files crash any of the PDF readers. It occasionally does cause 1 of them to crash.]

Answer 1

Oops! I hadn't realized.

Unlike on Windows, on Linux (or at least on OpenSUSE 13.2, Harlequin, i586 with KDE 4.14.9, using Python 3.4.1), FoxitReader gets run in a child process, so that also needs to be killed.

I was able to do that as instructed in jung rhew's Nov. 20, 2014 answer to StackOverflow question how to kill process and child processes from python?

Answer 2

Probably you should specify the kill code. According to the docs, the kill() method takes arguments. Try with p.kill(pid=your_pid_num, 9), because it says 'on UNIX this is the same as os.kill(pid, signal.SIGKILL).' https://pythonhosted.org/psutil/#psutil.Process.kill