REAP(1) General Commands Manual REAP(1) NAME reap – run process until all its spawned processes are dead SYNOPSIS reap [-vwx] command line ... DESCRIPTION The reap utility executes the given command line and ensures all spawned processes are dead before it exits. By default, it will start slaying the spawned processes when the main process exits. When the option -w is given, reap will instead wait for the processes to terminate. Upon receiving SIGINT or SIGTERM, reap will start slaying all children immediately. The options are as follows: -v Verbose mode, report what reap is doing. -w Wait for all spawned processes to finish. -x Forbid execution of binaries we cannot kill (using PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS). EXIT STATUS The reap utility exits with the exit status of the spawned command. On fatal errors, exit codes 111 is returned. ASSUMPTIONS reap uses the PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER feature of Linux. Slaying the children only works when the kernel configuration CONFIG_PROC_CHILDREN is enabled. reap can only work reliably when it has permission to kill all spawned processes and they respect SIGTERM (see also -x). RATIONALE Keeping track of all spawned process is traditionally a hard problem on Unix systems, mainly due to daemonization by forking twice. Other approaches on Linux exist, such as cgroups or PID namespaces. The approach taken by reap has the benefit of requiring no special permissions. AUTHORS Leah Neukirchen LICENSE reap is in the public domain. To the extent possible under law, the creator of this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work. http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ Void Linux September 23, 2019 Void Linux