pexit

This is a CLI tool to exit any process with arbitrary exit code.

Instead of killing a process, do you ever want to "exit" it? pexit comes to the rescue!

With some prerequisites (see below), you can force any process to exit, even with your specified exit code!

Why would you want to use pexit?

• For fun.
• In the case of running a pipelined job foo && bar, simply killing foo will cause it to exit with error and bar is not executed. Using pexit, however, can make foo exit with success so that bar continues to be executed.

Install

pip install pexit

Usage

pexit <pid> [<exit_code>]
# The default value for <exit_code> is 0 (meaning success)

Limitations

• pexit relies on the system call ptrace, which does not exit in some systems (like Windows).
• To be able to ptrace any process, you may need root privilege (sudo pexit ...) or allow this in system setting (sudo sysctl kernel.yama.ptrace_scope=0).

Acknowledgements

This project refers to the following sources:

• A great example showcasing how to use ptrace to run printf: https://github.com/eklitzke/ptrace-call-userspace/blob/master/call_fprintf.c