butcher_process
Process-tree lifetime and kill primitives, split out of the butcher mutation engine so a consumer can take the process abstraction without taking the engine.
The engine spawns real test suites, and those suites spawn their own children. Bounding such a run means ending a whole tree, not one process, and doing it the same way on every platform butcher runs on. That is what this package owns.
What it gives you
| Surface | What it does |
|---|---|
ProcessInterlock |
Owns the spawn, so the started process is a kill boundary; a job object on Windows, a process group on POSIX. |
SupervisedProcess |
One process tree with one owner: streams, a deadline, an idempotent kill. |
terminateAllSupervisedProcesses |
Reaps every live tree, so a signal handler needs no handle on a worker pool. |
liveDescendants |
The live pids inside the kill boundaries this run started: read-only accounting, and the only honest answer to "did the run leak". |
hostProcessCount |
A diagnostic count of live processes on the host, never a kill path and never a gate. |
final process = await SupervisedProcess.start('dart', ['test']);
final code = await process.wait(deadline: const Duration(minutes: 10));
if (code == null) print('the tree was killed on its deadline');
Limits
- A descendant that creates a session of its own leaves the group and survives
the kill. Such a process is reparented to pid 1, so it is unreachable from a
process listing too, and
liveDescendantsdoes not claim to see it. - On POSIX the group is entered by an exec-in-place shim:
setsidwhere it exists, otherwiseperl. Without either, the kill reaches only the started process and says so once, loudly.
License
MIT, derived from the upstream radioactive_dart package — see
LICENSE.
Libraries
- butcher_process
- Process-tree lifetime and kill primitives for the butcher mutation engine.