Killing parent process doesn’t kill child

killprocess

I have a question.
Studying processes management I observed a strange behavior, on a CentOS 7.
I know that killing a parent process, the child processes are killed also. But not in the following case. I ran the command dd, just for example:

[root@server2 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null &
[1] 1756

[root@server2 ~]# ps fax | grep -B2 dd
1737 pts/2    S      0:00         \_ su -
1741 pts/2    S      0:00             \_ -bash
1756 pts/2    R      1:18                 \_ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null

After that I tried to kill (with SIGKILL signal) the parent process, that is the bash, but this action doesn't kill the dd process:

[root@server2 ~]# kill -9 1741
Killed
[user@server2 ~]#

The shell terminates but as you can see in the top command output, the dd process is still working:

PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
1756 root      20   0  107948    612    512 R 99.9  0.1  10:06.98 dd

Do you have any idea about it please?

Best Answer

By default killing a parent process does not kill the children processes.

I suggest you look for other questions about how to kill both the parent and child using the process group (a negative PID).

A good answer about how to do this in detail can be found at Process descendants

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