In golang: Prevent child processes to receive signals from calling process

Question

Given is the following code:

package main
import (
    "os"
    "fmt"
    "os/exec"
    "os/signal"
    "syscall"
)

const NUMBER_OF_PEASANTS = 3

func createPeasants() map[string]*exec.Cmd {
    peasants := map[string]*exec.Cmd{}
    for i := 0; i < NUMBER_OF_PEASANTS; i++ {
        name := fmt.Sprintf("peasant#%d", i + 1)
        fmt.Printf("[master] Start %s...\n", name)
        cmd := exec.Command(os.Args[0], name)
        cmd.Stderr = os.Stderr
        cmd.Stdin = os.Stdin
        cmd.Stdout = os.Stdout
        if err := cmd.Start(); err != nil {
            panic(err)
        }
        peasants[name] = cmd
    }
    return peasants
}

func masterWaitForSignal(c chan os.Signal) {
    for true {
        s := <-c
        fmt.Printf("[master] Got signal %v but still running...\n", s)
    }
}

func peasantWaitForSignal(name string, c chan os.Signal) {
    s := <-c
    fmt.Printf("[%s] Got signal %v and will exit not with code 66\n", name, s)
    os.Exit(66)
}

func waitForPeasants(peasants map[string]*exec.Cmd) {
    for name, peasant := range peasants {
        if err := peasant.Wait(); err != nil {
            if exitError, ok := err.(*exec.ExitError); ok {
                waitStatus := exitError.Sys().(syscall.WaitStatus)
                fmt.Printf("[master] %s ended with exit code %d.\n", name, waitStatus.ExitStatus())
            } else {
                panic(err)
            }
        }
    }
}

func actAsMaster() {
    c := make(chan os.Signal, 1)
    signal.Notify(c, os.Interrupt)

    peasants := createPeasants()

    fmt.Printf("[master] Started.\n")
    go masterWaitForSignal(c)
    waitForPeasants(peasants)
    fmt.Printf("[master] Done.\n")
}

func actAsPeasant(name string) {
    c := make(chan os.Signal, 1)
    signal.Notify(c, os.Interrupt)

    fmt.Printf("[%s] Started.\n", name)
    peasantWaitForSignal(name, c)
    fmt.Printf("[%s] Done.\n", name)
}

func main() {
    if len(os.Args) > 1 {
        actAsPeasant(os.Args[1])
    } else {
        actAsMaster()
    }
}

When I run the code and hit [Ctrl]+[C] (while it runs) the following output it produced:

$ go run signaldemo.go 
[master] Start peasant#1...
[master] Start peasant#2...
[master] Start peasant#3...
[peasant#1] Started.
[master] Started.
[peasant#2] Started.
[peasant#3] Started.
^C[peasant#2] Got signal interrupt and will exit not with code 66
[peasant#1] Got signal interrupt and will exit not with code 66
[master] Got signal interrupt but still running...
[master] peasant#1 ended with exit code 66.
[master] peasant#2 ended with exit code 66.
[peasant#3] Got signal interrupt and will exit not with code 66
[master] peasant#3 ended with exit code 66.
[master] Done.

How can I prevent that the children receives the Interrupt signal? But I do not want to rewrite the children. A change in the calling process is required.

Answer 1

The child processes are starting in the same process group by default, and your shell is sending the signal to all the processes at once when you press ctrl+c. This is the default behavior of the shell to try and clean up when you interrupt a program.

The child processes won't receive signals sent directly to the parent.

If you want to prevent the ctrl+c behavior, you can force the child processes to start in their own process groups with with the Setpgid and Pgid fields in syscall.SysProcAttr before starting the processes.

cmd.SysProcAttr = &syscall.SysProcAttr{
    Setpgid: true,
    Pgid:    0,
}