process.kill() doesn't kill the real command while using shell option

[leobgm]

Version

16.14.0

Platform

UNIX Ubuntu 20.04.3 TLS

Subsystem

No response

What steps will reproduce the bug?

I'm not sure it could be reproduced in all cases. I'm usin spawn with shell: true to run a command.

How often does it reproduce? Is there a required condition?

For me, it's a constant behavior. Always the same.

What is the expected behavior?

Expected behavior is the real process to be killed with process.kill(). But only sh wrapper is killed. Real command keeps running.

What do you see instead?

I monitored my processes. When I run a command using spawn and shell: true, it runs two processes in OS. One is the sh wrapper, and another one in my real command. With two separate PIDs.

When I use process.kill(), sh is killed. But real command keeps running (not killed).

Additional information

Anything we get from a process instance such as process.pid or process.kill() is related to sh wrapper. Not real running command.

[Linkgoron]

I think that this is a duplicate of #37518

[leobgm]

Yes seems like the same problem. So is it fixed now? What version should I use?

And also, is there a way to get the PID of real command running (not sh)? Because I might need to solve it with my current using version of NodeJS.

[meixg]

Also a duplicate of #2098. It is more like a Linux pitfall than a Node.js bug.
And based on the discussion in https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/6052/files, there seems no good solution about this.

[bnoordhuis]

That's fundamentally how Unices work, it's not specific to node. If you use { detached: true }, you can send a signal to the process group with process.kill(-pid).

Closing, working as intended (by the inventors of UNIX.)