Ensuring subprocesses are dead on exiting Python program

Question

Is there a way to ensure all created subprocess are dead at exit time of a Python program? By subprocess I mean those created with subprocess.Popen().

If not, should

Answer 1

orip's answer is helpful but has the downside that it kills your process and returns an error code your parent. I avoided that like this:

class CleanChildProcesses:
  def __enter__(self):
    os.setpgrp() # create new process group, become its leader
  def __exit__(self, type, value, traceback):
    try:
      os.killpg(0, signal.SIGINT) # kill all processes in my group
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
      # SIGINT is delievered to this process as well as the child processes.
      # Ignore it so that the existing exception, if any, is returned. This
      # leaves us with a clean exit code if there was no exception.
      pass

And then:

  with CleanChildProcesses():
    # Do your work here

Of course you can do this with try/except/finally but you have to handle the exceptional and non-exceptional cases separately.