subprocess: deleting child processes in Windows

This is a hard thing to do. Windows does not actually store a process tree in the process space. Nor is it possible to terminate a process and specify that it's children should also die.

One way around that is to use taskkill and tell it to wack the whole tree.

Another way to do it (assuming that you are spawning the top-level process) is to use a module that was developed with this sort of thing in mind: http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/tag/killableprocess/

In order to do this generically for yourself, you have to spend some time building the list backwards. That is, a process stores pointers to it's PARENT, but parents appear to not store information about children.

So you have to look at all the processes in the system (which really isn't that hard), and then manually connect the dots yourself by looking at the parent process field. Then, you select the tree you are interested in and walk the whole thing, killing each node in turn, one by one.

Note that Windows doesn't update a child's parent pointer when the parent dies, so there may be gaps in your tree. I'm not aware of anything you can do about those.

Put the children in a NT Job object, then you can kill all children

I used kevin-smyth's answer to create a drop-in replacement for subprocess.Popen that confines the created child process in an anonymous job object, set up for terminating on close:

# coding: utf-8

from subprocess import Popen
import subprocess
import win32job
import win32process
import win32api


class JobPopen(Popen):
    """Start a process in a new Win32 job object.

    This `subprocess.Popen` subclass takes the same arguments as Popen and
    behaves the same way. In addition to that, created processes will be
    assigned to a new anonymous Win32 job object on startup, which will
    guarantee that the processes will be terminated by the OS as soon as
    either the Popen object, job object handle or parent Python process are
    closed.
    """

    class _winapijobhandler(object):
        """Patches the native CreateProcess function in the subprocess module
        to assign created threads to the given job"""

        def __init__(self, oldapi, job):
            self._oldapi = oldapi
            self._job = job

        def __getattr__(self, key):
            if key != "CreateProcess":
                return getattr(self._oldapi, key)  # Any other function is run as before
            else:
                return self.CreateProcess  # CreateProcess will call the function below

        def CreateProcess(self, *args, **kwargs):
            hp, ht, pid, tid = self._oldapi.CreateProcess(*args, **kwargs)
            win32job.AssignProcessToJobObject(self._job, hp)
            win32process.ResumeThread(ht)
            return hp, ht, pid, tid

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        """Start a new process using an anonymous job object. Takes the same arguments as Popen"""

        # Create a new job object
        self._win32_job = self._create_job_object()

        # Temporarily patch the subprocess creation logic to assign created
        # processes to the new job, then resume execution normally.
        CREATE_SUSPENDED = 0x00000004
        kwargs.setdefault("creationflags", 0)
        kwargs["creationflags"] |= CREATE_SUSPENDED
        try:
            _winapi = subprocess._winapi  # Python 3
            _winapi_key = "_winapi"
        except AttributeError:
            _winapi = subprocess._subprocess  # Python 2
            _winapi_key = "_subprocess"
        try:
            setattr(subprocess, _winapi_key, JobPopen._winapijobhandler(_winapi, self._win32_job))
            super(JobPopen, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        finally:
            setattr(subprocess, _winapi_key, _winapi)

    def _create_job_object(self):
        """Create a new anonymous job object"""
        hjob = win32job.CreateJobObject(None, "")
        extended_info = win32job.QueryInformationJobObject(hjob, win32job.JobObjectExtendedLimitInformation)
        extended_info['BasicLimitInformation']['LimitFlags'] = win32job.JOB_OBJECT_LIMIT_KILL_ON_JOB_CLOSE
        win32job.SetInformationJobObject(hjob, win32job.JobObjectExtendedLimitInformation, extended_info)
        return hjob

    def _close_job_object(self, hjob):
        """Close the handle to a job object, terminating all processes inside it"""
        if self._win32_job:
            win32api.CloseHandle(self._win32_job)
            self._win32_job = None

    # This ensures that no remaining subprocesses are found when the process
    # exits from a `with JobPopen(...)` block.
    def __exit__(self, exc_type, value, traceback):
        super(JobPopen, self).__exit__(exc_type, value, traceback)
        self._close_job_object(self._win32_job)

    # Python does not keep a reference outside of the parent class when the
    # interpreter exits, which is why we keep it here.
    _Popen = subprocess.Popen  
    def __del__(self):
        self._Popen.__del__(self)
        self._close_job_object(self._win32_job)