Aug 12, 2009
Hassle Free Way to Kill Sudo’d Jobs
Every now and then I have to run a foreground job under sudo that doesn’t want to die when I hit ^C. Then it’s a hassle to ^Z, get the pid of the sudo job, and sudo kill that pid.
So I wrote a little script (or a template for scripts) that runs the sudo job in the background (but preserves stdout/stderr) and relies on bash to clean up the job when you ^C the script. Only gotcha with this is that you may have to retype your sudo password when you ^C if your authentication has timed out by the time you get around to killing it.
#!/bin/bash
function cleanup()
{
sudo kill $job_pid
wait $job_pid
exit 0
}
trap cleanup SIGTERM
trap cleanup SIGINT
sudo long_running_foreground_process &
job_pid=$!
wait
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I’m embarrassed that I didn’t think of this approach before. I’ve been using a system which was much more complicated, simply because I didn’t think things through more carefully. Thanks for sharing.