Can Python kill a child process that keeps on running?

[Serge Orlov]

Edward Elliott wrote:
> Serge Orlov wrote:
> > I. Myself wrote:
> >> Suppose it is supposed to run for one minute, but it just keeps going
> >> and going.  Does Python have any way to kill it?
> >
> > On linux it's pretty easy to do, just setup alarm signal. On windows
> > it's not so trivial to the point you cannot do it using python.org
> > distribution, you will need to poke in low level C API using win32
>
> Can't you use a Timer thread and then send the runaway process a signal?
> Does Windows not have the equivalent of SIGHUP/SIGTERM/SIGKILL?

Windows doesn't have signals, so os.kill (that should rather be called
os.send_signal) is not implemented on Windows. Perhaps os module should
have os.terminate(pid) that can be implemented on Windows.

You're right about timer thread, it's better, I didn't think of it
because of my lack of experience with threading module. The watchdog
process code in my second post is almost useless: it's complicated and
os.kill is not available on windows anyway :-( Time to rest.