by |> I have a program that forks a child and wants to kill it after a certain
|> time (this is a command line argument to the program). The problem is
|> that the child itself starts up other children and when I try to kill
|> the first child from the parent, the other children continue to run.
|> How can I kill a process and all of its children from within my program?
You should have the child put itself into a new process group with setpgrp(),
but NOT have the grandchildren do so. Then, you can use killpg() (on some
systems, the functionality of killpg() is provided with kill(); check your man
pages) to kill the child's process group, which will make all of the
grandchildren go away as well.
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