Kill all processes that are descendants of (i.e. children, grandchildren , great grandchildren etc.) any given process.
May be called by handlers of exit traps in shell-scripts for graceful shutdown of background processes such as daemons.
killptree [-s signal] [-k seconds] [-w] pid # When run as executable
. ./killptree; kill_proc_tree [-s signal] [-k seconds] [-w] pid # When sourced-s: Pass the signal to be sent. Default: SIGTERM
-k: Pass number of seconds to wait before sending SIGKILL. Default: 0.1
-w: Wait for the descendant processes to be killed before killing the given process. Default: No wait
To kill all processes belonging to a process group as well as their descendants:
pgrep -g "${pid_of_pgroup_leader}" | xargs -n1 killptree(sleep 100 | (sleep 200 | ( sleep 300 | sleep 400 ) ) ) & pid=$!
ps -ef
killptree $pid
echo Happy?