Can't stop WEBrick 1.3.1 with ctrl-c on Ubuntu 11.04

Question

I\'m using RVM, Ruby 1.9.2, and Rails 3.0.7

A standard kill of the process from another terminal doesn\'t work, either, but kill -9 does, of course.

I found

Answer 1

I believe ^C can't kill WEBrick servers because the server creates a new session:

In webrick/server.rb:

  class Daemon
    def Daemon.start
      exit!(0) if fork
      Process::setsid
      exit!(0) if fork
      Dir::chdir("/")
      File::umask(0)
      STDIN.reopen("/dev/null")
      STDOUT.reopen("/dev/null", "w")
      STDERR.reopen("/dev/null", "w")
      yield if block_given?
    end
  end

(Very similar code exists in rack/server.rb, so if you're starting WEBrick via rack, you might want to leave off the -D or --daemonize command line options.)

And from the setsid(2) manpage:

   setsid() creates a new session if the calling process is not
   a process group leader.  The calling process is the leader of
   the new session, the process group leader of the new process
   group, and has no controlling tty.

has no controlling tty means that signals generated by a terminal (^Z SIGTSTP, ^\ SIGKILL, SIGTTIN, SIGTTOU, etc.) can't reach the process even if it had been started on that terminal. The link has been severed.