NAME

assassin.rb

SYNOPSIS

no zombies ever, not even on exit! or kill -9

USAGE

  pipe = IO.popen 'some-program-that-must-not-be-zombied'

  Assassin.at_exit_kill(pipe.pid)

also see lib/assassin.rb and test/assassin_test.rb

DESCRIPTION

assassin.rb is a small (~ 60 loc), simple, reliable methodology of ensuring that child processes are always cleaned up, regardless of the manner in which the parent program is shut down.

the basic concept it to generate, start, and detach another script that monitors the parent process and, when that process no longer exists, ensures through escalation of signals that a child process is shut down and does not become a zombie.

this becomes espcially important for libraries which spawn processes, such as via IO.popen that need to ensure those children are cleaned up, but which cannot control whether client code may call exit!. this approach also handles being kill -9d - something no at_exit{} handler can promise.

INSTALL

gem install assassin

URI

http://github.com/ahoward/assassin

HISTORY

• 0.4.2. initial release