Golang catch signals

Question

I want to implement a "process wrapper" in Go. Basically what it will do, is launch a process (lets say a node server) and monitor it (catch signals like SIGKILL, SIGTERM ...)

I think the way to do is to launch the node server in a go routine using syscall.Exec:

func launchCmd(path string, args []string) {   err := syscall.Exec(path, args, os.Environ())   if err != nil {     panic(err)   } } 

Then I'd like to catch every possible signals generated by the command executed by syscall. I'm pretty new to Go, any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

There are three ways of executing a program in Go:

1. syscall package with syscall.Exec, syscall.ForkExec, syscall.StartProcess
2. os package with os.StartProcess
3. os/exec package with exec.Command

syscall.StartProcess is low level. It returns a uintptr as a handle.

os.StartProcess gives you a nice os.Process struct that you can call Signal on. os/exec gives you io.ReaderWriter to use on a pipe. Both use syscall internally.

Reading signals sent from a process other than your own seems a bit tricky. If it was possible, syscall would be able to do it. I don't see anything obvious in the higher level packages.

To receive a signal you can use signal.Notify like this:

sigc := make(chan os.Signal, 1) signal.Notify(sigc,     syscall.SIGHUP,     syscall.SIGINT,     syscall.SIGTERM,     syscall.SIGQUIT) go func() {     s := <-sigc     // ... do something ... }() 

You just need to change the signals you're interested in listening to. If you don't specify a signal, it'll catch all the signals that can be captured.

You would use syscall.Kill or Process.Signal to map the signal. You can get the pid from Process.Pid or as a result from syscall.StartProcess.