c++ - Make child process spawned with system() keep running after parent gets kill signals and exits

Question

In a Linux/C++ library I'm launching a process via the system() call,

system("nohup processName > /dev/null&");

This seems to work fine with a simple test application that exits on it's own, but if I use this from inside of a Nodejs/V8 extension which gets a kill signal, the child process gets killed. I did find that running,

system("sudo nohup processName > /dev/null&");

With the sudoers file set up to not require a password manages to make this run even when the parent process (node) exits. Is there someway to entirely detach the child process so signals sent to the parent and the parent exiting have no effect on the child anymore? Preferably within the system() call and not something that requires getting the process ID and doing something with it.

Answer 1

The procedure to detach from the parent process is simple: Run the command under setsid (so it starts in a new session), redirecting standard input, output and error to /dev/null (or somewhere else, as appropriate), in background of a subshell. Because system() starts a new shell, it is equivalent to such a subshell, so

system("setsid COMMAND </dev/null >/dev/null 2>/dev/null &");

does exactly what is needed. In a shell script, the equivalent is

( setsid COMMAND </dev/null >/dev/null 2>/dev/null & )

(Shell scripts need a subshell, because otherwise the COMMAND would be under job control for the current shell. That is not important when using system(), because it starts a new shell just for the command anyway; the shell will exit when the command exits.)

The redirections are necessary to make sure the COMMAND has no open descriptors to the current terminal. (When the terminal closes, a TERM signal is sent to all such processes.) This means standard input, standard output, and standard error all must be redirected. The above redirections work in both Bash and POSIX shells, but might not work in ancient versions of /bin/sh. In particular, it should work in all Linux distros.

setsid starts a new session; the COMMAND becoming the process group leader for its own process group. Signals can be directed to either a single process, or to all processes in a process group. Termination signals are usually sent to entire process groups (since an application may technically consist of multiple related processes). Starting a new session makes sure COMMAND does not get killed if the process group the parent proces belongs to is killed by a process-group wide signal.