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I killed the process and the drain still hung: a grandchild held the pipe

A program of mine hung for forty minutes. Not spinning at a thousand loops a second: at zero percent CPU. It wasn't doing too much work; it wasn't doing any work at all. And still it wouldn't finish. The program does something common: it orchestrates external command-line tools. It launches one, reads what it writes to standard output, and moves on to the next when it's done. So it doesn't get stuck when a tool drags, each one has a timeout: when it fires, the process is killed and we carry on. That's the part that failed, and it failed where no one looks: after killing the process. Killing the process doesn't close the pipe When you read a subprocess's output, you read from a pipe: one end writes (the subprocess), the other reads (you). Your reader doesn't finish when the subprocess dies. It finishes when EOF arrives, and a pipe's EOF arrives only when the last write end is closed. Almost always they coincide: the subprocess is the only writer, it dies, its end closes,

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