how to kill a subprocess

[cerr]

On Sep 9, 3:29 pm, Alain Ketterlin <al... at dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr>
wrote:
> cerr <ron.egg... at gmail.com> writes:
> > I'm calling a python script from a php script which again calls a perl
> > script with subprocess.popen().
> > This seems to work fine so far only that once the python script
> > completed it is becoming a zombie because the perl script in the
> > background is still running... so before i exit the python script, i
> > would need to kill my perl subprocess.
> > How can i do so?
>
> x.terminate() (and then x.wait()) where x is the value returned by
> subprocess.Popen().
Well, this is what I have:

  writelog("starting GPS simulator")
  commandlist=[GPSsim,proto,GPSfile]
  writelog(commandlist[0]+" "+commandlist[1]+" "+commandlist[2])
  process=subprocess.Popen(commandlist)
  writelog("GPS simulator started")
  ...
  ...
  os.kill(process.pid,9)
  os.wait()

but this is not working for me... :( any clues?

> P/S: I'm not sure why the python process survives, and I think your use
> of "zombie" is not correct (afaik a zombie is an exited process whose
> parent hasn't called wait() yet)

This is what I have:

localhost cgi-bin # ps ax | grep py
11853 ?        Z      0:00 [python2.6] <defunct>
12029 pts/1    S+     0:00 grep --colour=auto py

The 'Z' you see there stands for Zombie