send command to parent shell

[Nobody]

On Wed, 13 Oct 2010 06:30:15 -0700, Martin Landa wrote:

> is there a way how to send command from python script to the shell
> (known id) from which the python script has been called?

For Unix, this should work, but in general it's the wrong thing to do:

	import os
	import signal
	os.kill(os.getppid(), signal.SIGKILL)

This is a rather unfriendly way to kill the shell (it won't be able to
save its history, etc), and if the program was started from something
other than a shell, you might kill something you don't want to.

Using SIGHUP is more friendly and will probably work, but it could be
caught and/or ignored (for bash, SIGTERM, SIGQUIT and SIGINT /will/ be
ignored). If the shell can catch the signal in order to save its history,
it can catch it and ignore it.

There isn't a nice way to do it. There isn't supposed to be a nice way to
do it. Processes may control their children, but a child isn't supposed to
control its parent.